Hannover Ruck SE

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call on Q2 2026 results. I'm Sergen, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, Please press start zero. Unauthorized recordings for publication or broadcast are not permitted. At this time, it's our pleasure to hand over to Karl Steindl. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome from sunny Hanover to our earnings call and our results for the first half year of 2026. Today's speakers are, as always, Clemens Jungstörsel, our CEO, and Christian Hermanningmeier, our CFO. And for the Q&A, they are joined by Claude Schaebre and Svend Alshoff.

With that, I hand over to you, Clemens. Thank you, Karl. And good morning, everyone from Hanover. So let's start with slide four. So Hanover East's business performance has been very satisfactory in the first half of 2026. We have seen, I'd say, a continuation of The positive developments from recent quarters, particularly the underlying profitability in the business, was very pleasing in both business groups. Our balance sheet and the resilience have been further strengthened. The market environment in P&C reinsurance was characterized by benign losses from natural catastrophes. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say this is simply good luck if you like, for the insurance industry. The earthquakes in Venezuela, recently in Japan, as well as extreme weather with heavy rain, heat waves, wildfires, they all serve as a reminder that this does not reflect any change in the risk landscape. On the contrary, risks are increasing, driven by rising insured values, by climate change, and by geopolitical uncertainty. and this clearly highlights the need for protection and reinsurance protection can only be offered at a price that adequately reflects the risks. But despite the softening of reinsurance rates, this still holds true on a broad basis for the current underwriting year. Hence, we have been able to broaden our footprint in P&C reinsurance supported by higher shares on programs with existing clients as well as new business. I'm therefore pleased to report year-to-date premium growth of plus 7.2% in the compound renewals in 2026. Looking ahead, I do remain confident that we will see continued growth while strictly adhering to our margin-oriented underwriting approach. Our competitive position is well supported by our strong client relationships and a lower cost ratio compared to our peers. So let me come back to our overall performance in the first half of 2026. With a group net income of 1.4 billion euros, we are well on track to deliver on our group net income target for the full year. In P&C reinsurance, the combined ratio of 83.2% is well within our target range, below 87%. In line with our usual approach, as you know, we have booked the full large loss budget for the period. So despite actual large losses coming in clearly lower. On top of that, the strong underlying profitability gave us room to further increase our reserve resiliency. The top line growth in PNC has been impacted by currency effects and the lower volume in structured reinsurance. And as explained already in our Q1 earnings call, this is really mainly driven by the anticipated reduction in the session rate for some individual large reinsurance programs. While currency adjusted revenue in our traditional business was broadly stable year on year, the underlying premium grew by around 4%. Looking ahead, the additional premium growth achieved in the 2026 renewals will increasingly seep through into the reported revenue during the second half. So our internal projections compared to the revenue development in 2025 do give us confidence that the lower end of our target range for growth in traditional business in 26 remains within reach. The new business CSM of 1.7 billion euro mainly reflects our successful renewals in 2026 and fully supports our planning for the year. The very small new business loss component confirms the continued high quality and attractive profitability of the new business we've been writing. The business performance in life and health reinsurance is in line with the positive trends seen in recent quarters. We were successful in further growing our portfolio and the new CSM generation of 385 million euro increased compared to the previous year. The reinsurance service result in life and health of 478 million is moderately ahead of the 50% of our full year target, which also reflects the healthy underlying profitability of the business. So the investment performance also was, I'd say, really satisfactory. The ROI, the return on investment, of 3.7% is comfortably above our 3.5% target. and it was not driven by any material extraordinary items. Finally, capitalization remained excellent with a solvency ratio of 254%. Operating capital generation was strong at around 1.8 billion euros in the first half of 2026. This was sufficient to cover both the increasing capital requirements from the successful expansion of our business and the quarterly accrual of the dividend. The moderate decrease in the solvency rate compared to year-end 2025 can be explained by movements in foreign exchange rates. On the next slide, the shareholders' equity rose by 2.6%. In addition to the positive contributions from our half-year result, currency effects were also a positive. The CSM grew by 11.4%, mainly reflecting our successful new business generation across both business groups. The risk adjustment increased by 5.8%, driven by new business and assumption changes in life and health. Altogether, developments on this slide really show continued positive value creation for our shareholders, and an improved foundation for future earnings growth. And on that note, I'll hand over to you, Christian.