3/5/2025

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the SCORE Fourth Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. There will be an opportunity to ask questions after the presentation. In order to give all participants a chance to ask questions, we kindly ask you to limit the number of your questions to two. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to Mr. Thomas Fossard. Please go ahead, sir.

speaker
Thomas Fossard
Head of Investor Relations

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to SCORE Q4 2024 Results Conference Call. My name is Thomas Fossard, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined on the call today by Thierry Léger, Group CEO, and Françoise Varenne, Deputy CEO and Group CFO, as well as by other COMEX members. Can I please ask you to consider the disclaimer on page two of the presentation? And now I would like to hand over to Thierry Léger, Thierry, over to you.

speaker
Thierry Léger
Group CEO

Thank you, Thomas. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining the call today. Let me start with a few key messages. The underlying performance of our businesses has been strong. P&C performance was excellent in the fourth quarter and throughout 2024 on a reported and normalized basis. We have been growing in a diversified and profitable way. The additional loss levels are in line with expectations and our net cash claims are within budget. We have built significant prudence in our P&C reserves two years ahead of plan. This is a strong demonstration of SCORE's underwriting discipline in a volatile environment. Life and health. shows a satisfactory result in Q4. However, the full year is still negative, impacted by the 2024 assumption review. We remain committed to the three-step plan we have established last summer to restore the profitability of our new and in-force business in life and health. Investments had another strong quarter. We achieved an elevated return over the full year through our high quality fixed income portfolio that benefited from ongoing high reinvestment rates. Our group solvency ratio stands at 210%, an increase of seven points compared to Q3, and one point higher than at the end of 2023. With this, we have fully absorbed the negative impacts from the Life and Health Review, proving the resilience of our balance sheet. The Board of Directors is proposing a dividend of 1.8 euros. This is in accordance with our capital management framework and takes into account the solvency ratio of 210% at the upper end of our optimal range. With the Q4 net income of 233 million euros, our full year results turned positive. Excluding the impact of the life and health review, our full year net income for the group would be €728 million, translating into a 14.9% ROI. I am very pleased with the successful one-on-one P&C renewals. We were able to leverage our T1 franchise and grow in a diversified and profitable way. The eGPI grows by 9.6% at stable and attractive net combined ratios. We estimate the Los Angeles Fires at 140 million euros per score, based on a 40 billion industry loss. This represents 25% of our annual CAT budget, which is a very good outcome, and the result of our cautious underwriting of climate change-exposed cat business. Throughout 2024, our teams have remained focused on execution of our Forward 2026 plan and have achieved substantial operational improvements in ALM, risk partnerships, business steering, and cost management. In more detail, in P&C, the combined ratio for the full year 2024 is 86.3% ahead of our forward 2026 assumption of 87%. This is mainly due to a very solid attritional performance, but also due to the 9.4 full year net cap ratio better than the 10% budget. As mentioned already, Included in these numbers is a significantly accelerated buffer building in 2024. In life and health, the insurance service result ISR is minus 348 million euros, negatively impacted by the life and health review and the adjustment of some arbitration positions, excluding these one-offs. The underlying life and health performance is plus 452 million euros ISR for the full year 2024. In Q4, we see an improved life and health performance with an insurance service result of 119 million euros. In investments, we continue to deliver stable returns with our high-quality, mainly fixed-income portfolios. The full year 2024 regular income yield is at 3.5%, at the higher end of our guided range for full year 24. Our solvency ratio stands at 210%, fully absorbing the negative impact of the life and health review. This demonstrates the resilience of our balance sheet, the quality of our management actions, and the strong underlying impact operating capital generation. I'm very satisfied with this outcome following a very challenging year. Of course, group economic value stands at 8.6 billion euros as at the end 2024, down 6.3% at constant economics. Again here, excluding the life and health review, our economic value growth would have been 9.8% above the 9% targets of our Forward 2026 plan. Our economic value per share is at 48 euros, down compared to year-end 23, but up one euro compared to Q3. I would like to point out that our current economic value per share is well above our actual share price. The full year return on equity is 0.2%. Adjusting for the Life and Health Review, the return on equity stands at 14.9%, well above the 12% assumption in our Forward 2026 plan. This shows the positive performance of our underlying businesses. SCORE's Forward 2026 strategic plan aims at increasing the resilience of our P&C and Life and Health Reserves and I'm very satisfied with the progress achieved in 2024. At group level, we raised the risk adjustment confidence level from 70-75% range in 2023 to a 75-80% range in 2024. This is a substantial improvement. Regarding the P&C Resolving Buffer, we are pleased to report that we are already significantly above the €300 million target set in Forward 2026. This puts us two years ahead of our three-year plan, i.e. we have achieved significantly more buffer building in one year than we had planned over three years. This allows us now to move to a more opportunistic approach going forward. We will build buffers as opportunities arise with the flexibility to show our underlying business performance sooner than planned. On the solvency side, we end the year one point above year-end 2023, fully absorbing the minus 29 percentage points impact from the life and health review. This is a demonstration of the resilience of our balance sheet and strength of our management actions. The underlying capital generation has improved to 26% over the full year. Our new ALM strategy and the placement of a whole account stop loss had a very positive impact too. And finally, we successfully issued a 500 million euro RT1 debt last December which was well received by the fixed income investors with a 5.6 times over subscription. As mentioned before, we are progressing well with the implementation of our new ALM strategy. This is a three-year journey, but we are seeing the first positive impact already. It enabled us to lengthen our S&P portfolio. It reduced the zones of capital required, SDR generating, a positive solvency ratio impact of six points. It reduced our sensitivities to interest rate movements in all currencies, except to the euro, where actions are planned for 2025 to reduce sensitivity further. Based on the solid underlying performance, the strong solvency ratio of 210%, and continued favorable business momentum, the Board of Directors has decided to propose a dividend of 1.8 euros per share. Of course, this is subject to shareholders' approval at the Annual General Meeting in May. I'm very confident in SCORE's future. We have strong people, know-how, and expertise. Our Tier 1 franchise gives us access to the reinsurance programs of all insurance clients around the globe. We have the ability to price any program in any line of business across the world. The 1-1 P&C renewals earlier this year have been a clear proof point for this and demonstrated our ability to grow in a diversified and profitable way. We are optimistic for the rest of the year and will continue to apply a disciplined underwriting approach. On the life and health side, we execute on our new strategy. We apply minimum hurdle rate to traditional protection business and accelerate growth in longevity and financial solutions. This will result in a better diversified and higher margin new business in going forward. On the in-force side, full attention is given to protect and extract value through improved monitoring, clear KPIs, and the disciplined execution of our mentioned actions. Of course, strategic positioning is very strong and provides us with the opportunity to grow in a diversified and profitable way in the years to come. François, over to you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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