Prudential plc

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Prudential PLC 2025 full year results Q&A audio webcast call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. I will now hand over to Patrick Bowes. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Prudential PLC's 2025 results analyst and investor call. Before I turn over to Anna Wodwani, our CEO, and then Ben Bulmer, our CFO, a couple of housekeeping points. A recording of today's call will be available from Tuesday next week. Our full results package is available on our website, and I'll refer you to the disclaimers and safe harbour wordings in these documents, and they also apply to this call. Anna and Ben will start the call with opening remarks, followed by a Q&A. Also on the call today are Angel Ng, Dennis Tan, Rajiv Mittal, and Naveen Tayyiani. Now let me pass over to Anil, our CEO, to start us off.

Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I would like to begin by expressing my sincere thanks to our retiring chair, Shriti Videra. Shriti has successfully led the board through a period of significant change for Prudential, through economic and political turmoil, and of course, the challenges of the COVID period. She has been a staunch supporter of the management team throughout our transformation journey. I'm very grateful for her leadership of the board and her counsel to me, and I wish her all the very best in her future endeavors. I'm also delighted to welcome Sir Douglas Flint as our incoming chair. who will take up the role at the conclusion of the AGM. Douglas has experience of financial services and strong knowledge of the markets we operate in, and I am looking forward to working closely with him. Turning to our 2025 full year results, I'm very pleased with the high-quality double-digit growth across our key financial matrix delivered in line with guidance and the increased returns for shareholders. This performance reflects the strength of our multi-market, multi-channel business model and disciplined execution of our strategy with a continued focus on writing high-quality new business. Both new business profit and adjusted operating profit after tax per share grew 12%, while gross OFST and dividend per share were both up 15%. Importantly, we consistently deliver double-digit growth in new business profit in every quarter of 2025. We also successfully completed the IPO of our Indian asset management company and increased our holding in our Malaysian conventional business to 70%. We continue to demonstrate disciplined capital management and a clear focus on shareholder value, and we now expect to return over $7 billion of capital to our shareholders between 2024 and 2027. Turning to our strategic transformation, we are now three years into our five-year plan and have delivered 18% CAGR in new business profit growth from 2022 to 2025. We continue to strengthen our capabilities and operational execution to deliver consistent and ongoing quality new business and cash generation. First, we are executing the focus across our distribution, strengthening our agency channel while sustaining strong momentum in bank assurance. Agency is our largest channel, and building and growing a high-quality professional and advisory-led agency force at credential scale requires sustained commitment and disciplined execution. Productivity measured as new business profit per active agent improved by 15% in 2022, which I am very pleased with. This has been supported by continued strengthening of our million-dollar roundtable or MDRT pipeline. At the same time, we see further opportunity to increase the number of active agents specifically in emerging markets in ASEAN through quality recruitment, segment-specific propositions, and supporting agent activity through technology enablement. Turning to bank assurance, Prudential has a leading bank assurance franchise in Asia. The channel delivered an outstanding year with new business profit crossing a billion-dollar mark, representing around 95% of the lower end of its 2027 new business profit objective. Second, we continue to enhance the quality of new business by deepening customer engagement and improving experience across all touchpoints, unlocking synergies with our in-house manager, eSpring, and building on our strengths in health to extend further into protection. Third, we are driving efficient growth by modernizing our technology as well as embedding analytics and AI across agency health and operations to better support our agency force and deliver simpler, better experiences for customers. And finally, we have continued to make good progress in reducing core business-related variances, supporting the quality and sustainability of our capital generation. As a result, gross OFSG increased by 15%, marking an important inflection point on the path to meeting our 2027 OFSG objective. While the microenvironment remains volatile, our presence across Asia and Africa gives us access to significant structural growth opportunities. The strength and resilience of our multi-market, multi-channel model allows us to deliver consistent, high-quality growth and generate sustainable shareholder returns. We will carry the momentum we set for ourselves in 2025 into 2026, and we firmly remain on track to achieve our 2027 financial objectives. Now, I'll hand it over to Ben, our CFO, to walk through our financial highlights.