Aia Group Ltd S/Adr

Good afternoon from AIA Central in Hong Kong, and welcome to our third quarter 2023 Q&A. I'm Lance Burbage, Chief Investor Relations Officer for AIA Group. Together with me today are Li Yuanxiong, our Group CEO and President, and Garth Jones, our Group CFO. We also have other members of the Group Executive Committee with us in the room or joining us from Singapore on Zoom. Today, this morning, we published our third quarter new business highlights on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and our corporate website. I'm sure you've had a chance to go through the document. Given the current environment, we thought it would be helpful to host a call. But before we start our Q&A, Yuen Siong will make some opening remarks on the third quarter performance.

Good afternoon, everyone. Let me start with some highlights from another excellent quarter for AIA. VOMB was up 35% to $994 million. This is the Group's highest-ever third quarter and reflects the strong demand for our products and services across Asia. We have built on our very strong first-half performance with further double-digit increases from our key growth engines of mainland China, Hong Kong, ASEAN and India. Both our agency and partnership distribution channels delivered excellent VOMB growth. Agency VOMB grew by 27%, supported by higher agent activity and a very strong increase in agent productivity. We also saw a quarter on quarter increase in high quality recruitment for the group and in each of our five largest markets. Working with our unrivaled network, our partnership channel delivered a 62% increase with growth in all of our reportable segments. A favorable product mix shift helped the group's VOMB margin increase from the first half to 51.2% in the third quarter. AIA China's VOMB margin improved through the third quarter, driven by product mix and repricing. As recruitment momentum has increased quarter on quarter during the year, we have seen an increased proportion of sales coming from customers new to AIA. I am also delighted that we recently received regulatory approval to upgrade our Sijiazhuang licence to cover the whole of Hebei Province. In September, we also received approval for a new city in Hubei Province, Xiangyang, where we expect to open in the first quarter of 2024. Just yesterday, we received another approval for setting up a new operation in Luzhou in Sichuan Province. AIA Hong Kong delivered another quarter of excellent growth with sales to mainland Chinese visitors continuing to represent about half the total VOMD. In Thailand, strong momentum has continued in the third quarter with similar growth to the first half. AIA Singapore and AIA Malaysia grew across our agency and partnership channels. Finally, other markets were up, excluding Vietnam, with strong double-digit growth from India and the Philippines. Our business in India continued to generate strong double-digit DONB growth, driven by excellent performance of its proprietary agency. Tata AIA Life is now the largest contributor to VOMB in the other markets segment and ranked No. 3 in Indian private life insurance. In summary, these new business results again reinforce the strength, quality and diversification of AIA's businesses. We are confident that the continued execution of our strategic priorities uniquely positions AIA to capture the enormous long-term opportunities in the Asian life and health insurance market and deliver long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders.

Now over to you for questions. Thanks, Yun Xiong. And we're ready for your questions. So over to you, Kelly. Thanks.