Prudential plc

Good morning everybody and thank you for joining us on today's Prudential Half Year Results 2025. My name is Drew and I'll be the operator on today's call. During the call, after our prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session. If you would like to register a question on today's call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad and to withdraw your question, it's star followed by two. It's now my pleasure to hand over to Patrick Bowles to begin. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Thank you, Drew, and good afternoon and good morning to everyone. Welcome to Prudential PLC's half-year 2025 results analyst and investor call. Before I turn the call over to Anil, our CEO, and Ben, our CFO, a couple of housekeeping points. A recording of today's call will be available from Tuesday next week, and our full results package is available on our website. Anil and Ben will start the call with opening remarks followed by a Q&A, as you've just heard. And just a quick word on recent developments we have shared with the market already regarding the potential listing of our shares in ICI Prudential Asset Management Company. We published the draft prospectus on the 9th of July. However, we remain under a number of restrictions as to what we can say about this given the next stage of the process is to undergo a series of regulatory reviews. We will provide you with further updates in due course. With that, let me pass over to Anil, our CEO, to start us off. Anil.

Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our 2025 first half results and capital management update. I'm very pleased with our financial performance in the first half of 2025, during which we delivered both high-quality growth and enhanced shareholder returns. We achieved double-digit growth across a key financial matrix in line with the guidance we gave earlier in the year. we have reached an inflection point in our operating fee surplus generation, enabling us to update our capital management program and increase shareholder returns. This demonstrates the strength of our business model and its ability to generate sustainable cash returns. New business profit and adjusted operating profit per share, both grew 12%, Close operating free surplus generation grew 14%, and dividends per share increased 13%. These results reflect strong momentum across our core markets, the sharpness of our execution, and our relentless focus on driving high-quality new business, effectively managing in force, and improving our variances. I'm also very pleased that we have now settled the dividend claim in Malaysia. Having reached the infection point in our capital generation and reflecting our confidence in the future, we have announced today a capital management update alongside an enhanced capital allocation framework, including the completion by the end of this year of our existing share repurchase program we expect to return in total more than $5 billion to shareholders between 2024 and 2027. Any initial net proceeds from the potential IPO of the asset management business in India will be in addition to this. Ben will cover our capital management update in more detail. We are now halfway through our strategic transformation, launched in August 2023, and are making good progress across our key priorities. We continue to invest to accelerate value creation across our markets, actively pursuing structural growth opportunities as well as addressing areas that need improvement. We have invested $400 million in targeted initiatives, including modernizing our technology, processes, and capabilities. Through these investments, we are accelerating our platform improvements, enhancing customer engagement, and driving operational effectiveness at scale. They are underpinned by an increased focus on the use of data, predictive analytics, and AI across the business. We are investing to make Prudential a stronger future-ready business. While the macro environment remains volatile, we are very well positioned given our multi-channel and our multi-market franchise. This is demonstrated by our broad-based new business profit growth, including 16% growth in our Hong Kong market and 34% growth in Indonesia. We have clear plans to continue to strengthen our performance, including in distribution and addressing areas of underperformance. Our multi-channel distribution model is one of our greatest strengths, and we have a good balance between agency and bank assurance. Agency is our primary distribution channel, and we have one of the largest forces in the Asian insurance industry. We see significant value in further strengthening it. Our agency strategy focuses on driving high-quality, profitable growth through quality recruitment, career progression towards MDRT, and digital capabilities that boost both productivity and activation. Further developing our agency capabilities and accelerating our performance is a top priority for us, and we are activating bespoke change management programs in our markets. In bank assurance, the continued focus on strategic relationships and training has underpinned our strong performance with 14 markets delivering double-digit growth in new business profit. We have also recently successfully activated a new partnership with Banksharia Indonesia. We are also building on the foundation of our health transformation efforts to further accelerate growth in health and protection sales. These efforts will be instrumental in unlocking the next phase of sustainable, high-quality growth. Reflecting on our strategic progress and investments in the growth drivers of our business, we are confident we will carry the momentum in the second half and beyond. This keeps us firmly on track to achieve our 2027 financial objectives. Today, I'm delighted to be joined on the call by the leadership team responsible for our businesses and would now like to hand it over to Ben Balmer, our CFO, to walk through the financial highlights.