Manulife Financial Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Manulife Financial fourth quarter 2024 results conference call. I would like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Han Ko. Please go ahead, Mr. Ko.

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's earnings conference call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial and operating results. Our earnings materials, including the webcast slides for today's call, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at manulife.com. Before we start, please refer to slide two for a caution on forward-looking statements and slide 42 for a note on non-GAAP and other financial measures used in this presentation. Please note that certain material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from what is stated. Turning to slide four, we'll begin today's presentation with Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide a highlight of our full year 2024 results and a strategic update. Our incoming President and Chief Executive Officer will also provide some remarks before we hand it over to Colin Simpson, our Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss the company's financial and operating results in more detail. After their prepared remarks, we'll move to the live Q&A portion of the call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Roy.

Thanks, Hung, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Yesterday, we announced our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. 2024 was a banner year for Manulife on many fronts, and we continued the momentum and finished the year with very strong results. During 2024, we further accelerated the growth of our highest potential businesses, led by Asia and Global WAM, which contributed to 70% of our record core earnings that exceeded $7 billion for the first time. This is a 10 percentage point increase since 2023. These results were supported by strong top line metrics with record AP sales, new business CSM and new business value in Asia and $13.3 billion of net inflows generated by our global WAM business. We also executed several milestone transactions to reshape our portfolio towards higher return and lower risk. You'll recall that in February of 2024, we closed the largest ever LTC reinsurance transaction at attractive terms with Global Atlantic, which was instrumental in establishing an active LTC reinsurance market. And then in April, we closed the largest ever Canadian universal life reinsurance transaction with another highly experienced strategic partner, RGA. This was followed by another LTC deal in less than 12 months when we announced a reinsurance transaction with RGA in November on a younger block. This deal recently closed in early January. In addition to further validating the prudence of our reserves and assumptions, these transactions will unlock significant value for our shareholders with an expected capital release of $2.8 billion. as well as a 0.4 percentage point accretion to our core ROE on a cumulative basis. Moving to slide seven. To support our strong operating momentum, we've been driving relentlessly towards our ambition of becoming the most digital, customer-centric company in our industry. Throughout 2024, we've been raising the bar for our customers and continue to enhance their experience through our digital initiatives, including the launch of a generative AI sales tool in Asia and the implementation of a new retail wealth platform in Canada for advisors. These efforts contributed to our record high relationship MPS of 27, a four point increase from the prior year. and an SCP of 89% that has exceeded our 2025 target of 88%. In addition, we remain focused on investing in our future by rolling out our advanced GenAI capabilities across the company. By the end of 2024, we've launched 27 use cases into production, with another 32 in development. And as we continue to scale these use cases across all areas of our business, we've now generated over $600 million of benefits from our digital initiatives globally in 2024, which was more than three and a half times the level we achieved in 2023. These successes are underpinned by continued investment in our digital capabilities. In addition to the $1 billion we've invested prior to 2023, as mentioned at our investor day, we are committed to invest another billion dollars between 2023 and 2025. As of the end of 2024, we've deployed nearly $600 million to improve our digital capabilities and efficiency. While we accelerate our digital transformation, we also remain disciplined in our overall expense management across the franchise and achieved an efficiency ratio of 44.8%. which is already in line with our medium term target of below 45%. As I've said many times before, none of these achievements would have been possible without our world class team, who have time and time again demonstrated strong execution against our targets. As shown on slide eight, I'm proud to see our winning and high performing team together with the strong culture that we've built recognized by many leading organizations. For the fifth consecutive year, we also achieved top quartile employee engagement scores. As highlighted at our Investor Day, we have a portfolio that is not only high growth and high return, but also highly cash generative. In 2024, our global business generated strong remittances of $7 billion, which was a record. and we've been diligently returning capital to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks totaling over $6 billion. To continue this momentum, I'm pleased to note that yesterday our board approved another 10% increase in our common share dividend. In addition, we announced yesterday the launch of a new buyback program to repurchase up to 3% of our outstanding common shares commencing in late February 2025. We continue to view buybacks as a good tool to deploy our capital to generate shareholder value. And based on our current share price, our share buybacks since 2021 have generated a benefit of approximately $3 billion as at the end of 2024. Onto slide nine, where you'll see a snapshot of our strong financial and operating results in 2024. We've delivered record AP sales, new business CSM and new business value in 2024, reflecting growth of 30% and higher. In fact, we achieved our four best quarters ever for all three metrics. Global WAM also generated another year of net inflows, and this adds to the impressive record of positive net inflows in 14 out of the last 15 years. We generated strong core EPS growth of 11% supported by our Asia and global WAM businesses. Excluding the impact of global minimum taxes, core EPS growth would have been 14%. Well above our medium term target of 10 to 12%. The strong earnings growth contributed to the continued expansion of our core ROE to 16.4% for the full year. which clearly demonstrates that we're well on track to deliver on our 2027 target of 18% plus. We've also delivered robust book value growth over the year at 15% in both adjusted book value and book value per share, while returning over $6 billion of capital to our shareholders. and we maintained a strong balance sheet with significant financial flexibility supported by our strong LICAT ratio of 137% and leverage ratio of 23.7%. As I reflect on the successes that we've achieved and the momentum that we've built, I could not be prouder to have led such a high performing organization. We've transformed Manulife and positioned our franchise to reach even greater heights. I'm going to touch on just a few of these highlights in the next slide. Over the span of seven years, we've significantly grown the earnings contribution from our highest potential businesses by 16 percentage points from 54% to 70%. As we changed our business mix over time, we also significantly expanded our core ROE by 5.1 percentage points from 11.3% to 16.4%. From a book value perspective, we generated substantial growth of 96%, or $18.13 per share, while returning nearly $25 billion of capital through dividends and share buybacks over this period. This includes a cumulative growth of 95% on our annual dividend per common share from $0.82 per share to $1.40 per share. With these results as our foundation, we've delivered top quartile total shareholder return of 137% over the last seven years. And we're set to reach even greater heights in the next phase of our journey. While we expect to see continued macroeconomic volatility and geopolitical uncertainty in 2025, our diverse footprint and businesses, supported by our strong balance sheet and financial flexibility, position us well to navigate such environments. I'm confident that we will continue to capitalise on the strong momentum. And as I've said before, I can't think of a better incoming CEO to lead us into the next chapter than Phil Witherington. With that, before we have Colin provide highlights on the financial results, I'd like to pass it over to Phil for a few words. Phil, over to you.

Thanks, Roy, and good day to you all. Before I start, I'd like to recognize Roy for his exemplary leadership, including setting and delivering on our strategic priorities, steering Manulife through the pandemic, accelerating growth in our highest potential businesses globally, reshaping our portfolio and optimizing returns, as well as establishing Manulife as a digital customer leader. These are just a few of his many contributions to transforming Manulife into the company it is today. And on a more personal note, over the course of the past decade, I've truly enjoyed working closely with Roy and I'm very grateful for his partnership, mentorship and friendship. Now, with the incredible foundation that we've built together under Roy's tenure as CEO, I'm thrilled and excited by the opportunity to lead the next chapter of growth for Manulife globally and deliver on the bold ambitions that we set out as our investor day in June 2024. We will continue to focus on the execution of our strategy and delivering on the raise the bar targets we've set ourselves. We've seen strong momentum in Asia and global WAM, and I'm committed to continuing to invest to sustain this momentum and deliver on the compelling growth opportunity these businesses have while maintaining our market leadership in Canada and continuing to focus on our unique offerings in the U.S. to provide differentiated solutions to the financial and life stage needs of our customers. We will also continue to invest in advancing our digital and customer leadership priorities, which will further improve our customer service capabilities, enhance our efficiency and contribute to the delivery of our growth ambitions. Meanwhile, and until May 8th, I have three key priorities. First, I will be laser focused on executing in Asia to deliver high quality, sustainable growth. Second, selecting and transitioning a successor to lead our Asia segment, and I look forward to sharing more on that with you in due course. Lastly, executing a seamless transition with Roy, providing for continued momentum for Manulife. I am excited for the future for Manulife. we have strong foundations and a roadmap to deliver on our ambitious yet achievable targets. And I truly believe that we're well positioned to build on our momentum to reach even greater heights and continue to generate shareholder value. And finally, I'd like to take a moment to thank our business partners and other stakeholders around the world, as well as our global leadership team and every single one of our over 37,000 employees for the support that you've extended. I'm very much looking forward to working with you even more closely in this next chapter for Manulife. And with that, I'll hand it over to Colin to review the highlights of our financial results. Colin.

Thanks, Phil, and welcome back to Canada. As I reflect on 2024, I'm proud of what we've achieved and the momentum we've built over the course of a fantastic year at Manulife. Let me dive into more detail on the fourth quarter's results before the Q&A. Starting with our new business metrics and slide 13 once again we delivered very strong growth of over 30% across AP sales new business CSM and new business value. Our AP sales increased 42% from the prior year with contributions from all our segments, led by the continued momentum in Asia with broad based growth across the region. Our strong sales also drove substantial increases in new business CSM and new business value of 32% and 31% respectively. Global WAM delivered another quarter of positive net flows of $1.2 billion with solid contributions from our institutional and retail businesses. It's been a tremendous year for our top line growth, particularly in our Asia and Global WAM segments, which bodes well for the continued earnings growth for these higher return businesses. It was a record year and quarter for our core earnings on slide 14 i'd like to call out some of the highlights of the drivers of earnings analysis presented relative to the prior quarter. The first point to note is that the continued growth in our insurance businesses has contributed to higher insurance service results, but that was partially offset by the impacts from the to reinsurance transactions completed in 2024. Also contributing to the increase was the net favorable insurance experience across all segments, which notably improved year over year. Moving down on the DOE table, you will see that Global WAM once again generated strong growth, the fifth consecutive quarter of 20% plus growth in pre-tax core earnings, and it is now the second largest contributor to core earnings. The impact of GMT on our core earnings was a $57 million charge for the quarter, which dampened our core earnings growth by approximately three percentage points. Onto slide 15. Poor EPS increased 9% year on year as we grew core earnings and continued buying back shares. The growth would have been 13%, which is above our medium term target range of 10 to 12% if normalized for the impact of GMT. Now, Let me expand on the notable non-core items for the quarter. First, low than expected public equity returns during the quarter resulted in $113 million charge. We also reported a charge of $97 million in our older portfolio driven by low than expected return on commercial real estate investments. While still below our expected long-term rate of return, we saw sequential improvement in returns. As an update, we have completed the sale of all the portfolios related to the two reinsurance transactions that in aggregate are valued at slightly above the most recent fair value. This is a testament to the strength of our well-diversified portfolio and our up-to-date valuations. I would also note that we reported a restructuring charge of $52 million, mostly in global WAM, which is a part of our continued focus on expense efficiency. The vast majority of this charge relates to severance and should result in an improved efficiency ratio going forward. Moving to the segment results, starting with slide 16. Our Asia segment continued to generate substantial growth in both top and bottom line metrics. APE sales increased by 63% from the prior quarter, driven by broad-based growth across the region led by Hong Kong, which saw growth across all sales channels. We also delivered strong growth in new business CSM and MBV of 38% and 37% respectively. And we delivered 16% core earnings growth in Asia, mainly driven by the continued business growth momentum. Onto our global WAMS results on slide 17. We maintained our momentum in global WAM with an increase of 34% in core earnings. This strong growth was supported by higher average third-party AUMA, crossing the trillion dollar mark during the fourth quarter for the first time, performance fees from CQS, and continued focus on managing expenses, as well as certain non-recurring tax true-ups and benefits of approximately $23 million. Net inflows were $1.2 billion for the quarter, with positive flows from our institutional business, driven by fixed income and equity mandates, as well as our retail business, benefiting from strong equity markets and investor demand. These were moderated by net outflows from our retirement business due to pension plan redemptions. We continue to generate positive operating leverage through core EBITDA margin expansion of 290 basis points from the prior year quarter to 28.6%. Bringing you over to Canada on slide 18, which also delivered strong results during the quarter. APE sales increased 4% from the prior quarter, driven by higher participating life insurance and segregated fund sales, though partially offset by low sales and group insurance, which also modestly impacted MBV growth. Canada generated strong growth in core earnings at 11%, primarily driven by more favorable insurance experience overall, as well as business growth in our group insurance business. Moving to slide 19 on our U.S. segment results. In the U.S., we continue to see an increase in demand for our accumulation insurance products from affluent customers, which drove up AP sales by 7% and contributed to the growth in new business value of 17%. The higher sales volume also contributed to our new business CSM, but it was more than offset by the impacts of product mix and higher interest rates, resulting in a modest 5% decline year over year. Core earnings decreased 16% from the prior quarter as a result of lower investment spreads and earnings foregone due to the global Atlantic reinsurance transaction, as well as the net impact of the basis change. Moving on to cash generation and capital allocation on slide 20. Back in our investor day in June 2024, we introduced a new cumulative remittance target of $22 billion plus by 2027. We started off this journey strong, generating record remittances of $7 billion in 2024. This result benefited from capital optimization initiatives, including our first LTC reinsurance transaction with Global Atlantic, as well as strong cash generation from our underlying businesses. As a reminder, we expect 60 to 70% of core earnings to materialize as cash remittances on a go-forward basis. On the back of the strong cash and capital generating capability, we returned over $6 billion to shareholders in 2024 through dividends and share buybacks. As Roy mentioned, we will initiate a new buyback program in late February 2025 to repurchase up to 3% of our outstanding common shares. This includes returning the $800 million of capital expected to be freed up as part of the LTC reinsurance transaction announced with RGA in November 2024. In addition, our board has approved a 10% increase in our quarterly common share dividend, continuing the trend of increasing dividends to our shareholders. We will maintain our disciplined capital allocation approach, investing in our attractive new business opportunities, systems, and capabilities, as well as maintaining an attractive dividend payout ratio. We will continue to look for inorganic growth where it makes sense and use share buybacks as part of our capital optimization activities. Bringing you to our balance sheet, and you can see our book value growth on slide 21. We grew our adjusted book value per share by 15% from the prior year to $37.02, even after returning over $6 billion of capital to shareholders, as I mentioned earlier. Our like-head capital ratios remain stable over the quarter at 137%, and our financial leverage ratio of 23.7% remains below our 25% medium-term target. changes in the liket guideline mostly relating to the revised guidance for segregated funds are effective january 1st 2025. we expect the impact of these changes to be modest reducing our like at ratio by approximately one percentage point moving to slide 22 which summarizes how we're tracking against our 2027 and medium-term targets in addition to the strong remittances and core eps growth i mentioned earlier We expanded our core ROE by half a percentage point in 2024 to 16.4%, which reflects our strong business performance and disciplined capital allocation. And with our continued expense discipline limiting core expense growth at 5%, together with higher pre-tax core earnings growth, we reduced our expense efficiency ratio to 44.8%, achieving our medium-term target of less than 45%. Our CSM balance growth was below our target range on a constant exchange rate basis, but the continued strong growth momentum in our top line results, which contributed to organic CSM growth of 6% in 2024 and 10% annualized in the fourth quarter alone, gives me confidence that we will achieve our target over the medium term. And finally, On slide 23, we wanted to show you a snapshot of the progress we made on our core ROE, including our segment's results, demonstrating that we're well on our way to achieving our 18% plus target by 2027. This concludes our prepared remarks. Before we move to the Q&A session, I would like to remind each participant to adhere to a limit of two questions, including follow-ups, and to re-queue if they have additional questions. Operator, we will now open the call to questions.

Thank you. We will now take questions from the telephone lines. If you have a question, please press star 1 on your device's keypad. You may cancel your question at any time by pressing star 2. Please press star 1 at this time if you have a question. There will be a brief pause while participants register. Thank you for your patience. And the first question is from Manny Grauman from Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I wanted to ask about ALDA. That drag is definitely shrinking, including in Q4, and I just wanted to better understand what drove that. Is that primarily PE, or is there some dynamic on the real estate side? What's the key driver for the improvement in the quarter there?

Hi, Manny. It's Trevor. Thanks for the question. So, yes, obviously happy to see the better ALDA experience for the quarter, consistent with our expectations for a steady improvement over time. The main driver of the non core loss was again real estate return was largely flat with small declines in external appraisals offset by income. The remaining classes were a mix of gains and losses with infrastructure quite strong. And private equity much better than Q3 to your point supported by some lumpy gains, I think, in terms of the outlook, we do expect broad improvement across the portfolio. But do expect office real estate to continue to underperform for a period, so the path will, I think, to some degree, be dependent on the economic environment, but we do expect a continued improvement.

Just as a follow-up, if office continues to underperform, is it still realistic? Could we still see positive experience next year, or would that preclude that outcome?

Yeah, thanks for the follow-up. No, I think we're still reasonably comfortable that we will get back to our long-term assumptions around the middle of this year. It is, as I said, I think subject to the economic environment, but I think while office has been a little bit challenged, I think industrial and multifamily has actually performed quite well. And so we remain, I think, you know, confident.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. The next question is from Gabriel Deshaies from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Just want to ask about the Asia segment. Good quarter, good year, both in terms of profit growth and sales. I'm just wondering about the outlook, though, from two perspectives here. First, it seems like there was a substantial boost just as a result of the actuarial assumption review in 2023. So your risk adjustment went down this year, but your CSM amortization or unwind, whatever you want to call it, went up. The net of the two is positive. So next year, 2025, we're going to be apple to apple. So that tailwind won't be there to the same degree. And then on the global minimum tax, uh i i assume you're uh applying it you know as if it was effective across all your regions uh and it hasn't been adopted i don't think in in all of your asia footprint so if it were to be adopted and applied to all of your asia footprint what would uh you know the impact be on profits or i expect the gmt impact is is mostly in asia and that's just a more of a geographic thing from a segmentation standpoint. It wouldn't change your consolidated performance, would it?

Great. Well, this is Phil. Thank you for the question, Gabriel. I'll start on the first question on Outlook and probably touch briefly on GMT, but I'll hand over to Colin to elaborate on that. 2024 has certainly been a strong year for Asia. Tremendous business momentum that's absolutely continued into the fourth quarter. 37% growth in new business value. And that's high quality growth coming, as Colin said in his remarks, coming from all of our distribution channels. We've seen strong double digit growth, agency, bank assurance, as well as third party channels, including broker. And I think it is notable that, of course, we've made very notable investments in Asia. We walked through some of those as part of Investor Day in June. It's notable that Hong Kong and Singapore continue to emerge strongly as regional hubs, regional wealth management and financial services hubs. And that's part of what's driving the growth. But the growth is broad based. We've seen seven markets growing double digit year on year in the fourth quarter. But you were specifically asking about outlook, and you talked about the methodology change that was put in place a year ago. I do want to highlight that of the 27% core earnings growth that we have seen in 2024, the components of that that came from the methodology change was in the order of 10%. So the majority of the growth we're seeing is from Normal, um, normal activity and that that's a combination of, of course, the highest build from higher sales, continued. Disciplined expense expense management and notably improvements in policy holder experience that I believe are sustainable. Q4 is an interesting benchmark when it comes to earnings growth. There is no distortion in Q4 from the methodology change. It's been a full year since that methodology change happened, and so the 16% core earnings growth is sustainable. Now, on GMT, I will hand over to Colin, but I just want to highlight that during 2024, when we did start providing for GMT, it we provided for all markets where we would expect gmt to buy so all markets where the average tax rate was below 15 the top-up tax was recognized in the corpus and other segment but i'll hand over to colin to elaborate on that hi gabe um yeah phil's absolutely right not all the countries enacted in 2024 so we kept the charge of the corporate segment um once hong kong enacts and they are enacting in 2025 we will incur

the tax where it is earned. As far as how much has come from Asia, out of the $57 million, 80% came from Asia, and we would expect that to be a good run rate going forward. So you can use that for your models. I will say that is shared between both our insurance and our asset management segments.

Okay. So the numbers as we see them consolidated It's the GMTs in effect, and next year if it's applied to the segments, it's just a – I don't know. I call it a geographic issue.

That's right. We'll push it down from the center into each business.

Right, right. And last question. Is this Roy's last call? It is not, Gabriel, but thank you for asking. Okay, okay. Well, I'll save my best wishes for next quarter then. I'll look forward to that. All right, have a good one.

Thank you. The next question is from Alex Scott from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. First one I have for you all is on GWAM and was just interested if you could talk about the margins in the business and, you know, they look, you know, I think even when you take out some of the more one-time-in-nature things, They were talked about, you know, the margins looked really strong this quarter, and I know markets are up, so it sort of makes sense. But just wanted to see if you could add any additional color around, you know, expense discipline margins and, you know, what you anticipate going forward there.

Great. Thanks, Alex. It's Paul here. I'll take your question. Yeah. Thanks for recognizing the strong results and the margin. And as Colin mentioned into slides, there is some, some really strong momentum in the business. And while there was some one-time tax items, it is our fifth consecutive quarter of over 20% growth on a pre-tax earnings basis. And, and that's really driven by just the fundamentals of the business. We have a great diversified franchise. We've got access to higher margin geographies and product lines, and we've got some really good momentum from a, from a top line perspective. And kind of looking forward, I guess if you actually look at this year, you've seen the combination of not just strong markets, but strong top line growth and really strong disciplined expense management. We do expect that to continue. We did take some actions this quarter that will generate run rate savings going forward. And that's a nice tailwind for us to kind of keep the momentum of disciplined growth on the expense line. But when we couple that with just the strong top line growth that we're seeing, And if you just look at our business, I guess one of the things that differentiates us is about 50% of our core earnings come from outside the U S about two thirds of that come from outside of retail, both retirement institutional tend to be longer term focus. So they don't have the same volatility. And, and if you look at our global retirement business this year, we surpassed 1 billion in core earnings for that business. And if you look at the earnings power of that business per dollar of AUM relative to some of our peers, it's driving some fantastic, margins and results on a more diversified platform. So we feel really good about the outlook. We think our ability to continue to drive strong top line growth and positive net flows will continue over the long term. And with the management team continuing to focus on expenses, we would expect that to continue over time.

Thank you. Follow-up question is on the P&C, I guess, catastrophe reinsurance operation that you guys have. Can you talk about your exposure to the California wildfires? And I guess, you know, even beyond like what we might see next quarter, if there is anything, you know, if you could talk about how this maybe changes the risk profile of your aggregate exposure going into hurricane season, just because, you know, we're, we're only, you know, a couple months into the year and some of these aggregates are already, you know, pretty filled up. And, you know, I think some of the primaries that I cover look like they will attach at some point this year, even in the normal hurricane season. So I'd just be interested in, you know, if it changes the profile of sort of the PML exposure you all have there.

Yeah, Alex, it's Mark Costantini here. Thanks for your question. So you've got a couple questions embedded there. The first, I'll start by saying that the When you see wildfires and natural catastrophes like that, you know, our heart goes out to obviously everybody affected and it's terrible to see. So that being said, as you say, we do have obviously a PNC retro business and our exposure to the wildfires and events such as that has a limit of about 90 million U.S. dollars. I would say we don't have reporting. Obviously, we are a retrocessionary, right? So it's got to go to a fair bit of reporting before it gets to us. But based on the industry estimates that are coming out in terms of insured losses, we would expect our exposure to these wildfires to be less than half of that $90 million US limit. Obviously, as we get more reporting through Q1, we'll obviously reflect all of this in our Q1 financials when we close our books in a couple months. So your broader question about you know our exposure to hurricane season I would I would go back to obviously Ian was a big hurricane and we are affected but I would say if you look at the past two years we adjusted our underwriting very strongly we increased our attachment points we tightened our pricing We adjusted terms and conditions across all our portfolio, and you saw the benefit of that coming in 2023 and 2024. And the actual exposure that we saw to E in the final analysis, which is not complete yet, was much lower than what we had reserved for back in 2022, so positive developments, and you saw some of that in Q4 filter 2. the key renewal season is behind us already. It's January 1, 2025, and I would tell you that our approach to that renewal season was very much in line with what I just mentioned about the last couple of years, and we feel good about our portfolio. Having said so, We take volatility out of other people's balance sheets when there's catastrophes that, you know, exceed 50 plus billion dollars, right? So if there's such an event coming up later in 2025, which is highly unknown, and it depends a lot as well where it hits, then obviously our portfolio may be affected. But the last thing I'll leave you with is that when you look through the course of time and cycles, this business has by far exceeded 20 to 25% return on capital. So we're quite proud and it provides a lot of very hard cash every year, year in, year out when we do well. So thank you.

Thank you for all the details.

Thank you. The next question is from Paul Holden from CIBC. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I want to ask a question on earnings on surplus. In the corporate segment, it increased quite a bit quarter over quarter, so maybe you can address the drivers of that, and maybe more importantly, a lot of movements in interest rates across geographies and what that kind of implies for earnings on surplus going forward. Thank you.

Thanks, Paul. It's Colin here. So we invest our surplus long, so you would expect a very stable result on our earnings on surplus. However, as you pointed out, we did actually see some increase. It's 20 million year on year and 37 million quarter on quarter. Couple of issues going on. One is currency is at a favorable impact. We do hold some of our surplus in US dollars and the second issue is just as part of normal course business. We did have some fun rebalancing and that created a positive contribution, which is one off for the quarter. But if you look at the ongoing run rate, I would take the average of the past four quarters as a good forward looking estimate for earnings on surplus. To my first point on investment, fairly immune from movements in the short-term rate. And so you wouldn't expect a lot of variability in our earnings on surplus. In fact, if the yield curve moved down by 50 basis points, we would only have a $25 to $30 million impact on earnings on surplus. So you can expect a fairly stable number in this line going forward.

Paul, the only thing I'd add to Colin's comments are that the surplus bond portfolio for us today is about $40 billion, and the average yield is about 2.85 on that portfolio. And as we've talked about in the past, obviously higher rates are a positive tailwind to our business. And if you look at U.S. Treasuries at the moment, 30-year U.S. Treasuries around 4.8. As that portfolio matures and we reinvest those maturities, that will be certainly a tailwind so long as rates continue to stay elevated. And that's something that obviously will continue to flow through our results.

That extra color is helpful then. Of that $40 billion, roughly how much would be U.S. dollars?

It's roughly about a quarter to a third, Paul. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. Second question is related to the Asia business. As you're probably aware, one of your competitors took a fairly sizable write-down in Vietnam. Now, Manulife has obviously been exposed to the same challenging industry conditions. So maybe you can walk us through your review of the Vietnamese business and why Manulife did not take a similar write-down.

Hey, Paul, this is Phil. Thank you for the question. And I think it's important to note that Manulife in Vietnam is one of the leading life insurers in the market. We're without doubt a scale player with a very large in-force portfolio. And that's That strong enforced portfolio and those strong roots does make us resilient to changes that may arise, you know, the regulatory environment, the macro environment that can impact sales from quarter to quarter, year on year. With respect to your specific question on intangible assets that are capitalized for bank assurance partnerships, Our approach for all bank assurance partnerships, and this is true across the region, is very much to take a partnership approach whereby our interests are aligned with our bank partners and we routinely build in protections for ourselves such that there are financial clawbacks or other protections in the event of sales falling below targets. And one of those common protections is an automatic extension of the term of an agreement if sales fall below our agreed business plans. So, taking into account those protections, as well as our expectations for the future, we have reviewed the recoverability of our intangible assets, and our conclusion is that our intangible assets are recoverable. And I think it's really important to note that the strength of our distribution across all of our channels does position as well to capture the rebound from Vietnam that I believe is inevitable. It's been a tough couple of years, but the market shows substantial promise over the medium term in line with the rest of the ASEAN markets.

I just have to quickly then follow up. Have any of your bank assurance agreements then been extended in Vietnam?

Actually, what we've actually done, to be very transparent, over the course of the fourth quarter, we mutually agreed to exit one of our bank assurance partnerships in Vietnam. And that mutual agreement to exit, combined with the protections that we had built into our agreement, resulted in us recovering substantially all of our unamortized intangible asset relating to that agreement.

Very helpful. Thanks for the time. Appreciate it.

Thank you. The next question is from Doug Young from Desjardins Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Hopefully this will be relatively quick. But on the remittances, Colin, $7 billion, I think there was mention of positive impact from the reinsurance transactions. I apologize if it's somewhere in your details here, but can you quantify what that $7 billion would have been if you say what the impact was from the reinsurance deals?

Hey, Doug. Yeah, sure. We took $750 million from the reinsurance transaction through to remittances. And actually, that $750 million is relative to the $1.2 billion that we said at the time of the transaction. So you can expect a bit more coming from that LTC transaction.

And so just, I mean, I know it's one year into your four-year plan of getting to $22 billion accumulative, but It looks like you're well ahead of plan. Is that what we should be taking away from this in terms of remittances, or was 2024 just an abnormally really good year?

It's a combination of both, Doug. So, sure, $7 billion into a $22 billion four-year target is a great start, and we're really pleased with the remittances. Certainly, the LTC one-off remittance wasn't a surprise when we set the target, but we've had some Good tailwinds from markets. And a lot of that comes through the center. You know, I talked about our surplus account. And so interest does have an impact on the surplus at the center. But we've also been working on some optimization activity. We took a dividend out of our P&C business. We had tax settlement, which we recorded last year. And so the cash earnings of that was received. So all those come together to create a little bit of a one-off in the sense, and you'll see that, but going forward, you would expect 60 to 70% of our earnings to come through as remittances, and that's largely because we're a really cash-generative business with a great asset management contribution.

Doug, when we highlighted remittances at our investor day, it was very specifically focused on highlighting the power of the organic capital generation of the franchise, and as well, the strong remittability of that cash generation, so we thought I thought that target was an important one. And obviously getting out off the bat in the first year with a very strong start is something we're very proud of. But we also think that that will continue. And like all of the other targets that we established at Invest Today, our goal is to not just achieve them, but to exceed them. This is a good starting point for that one.

And just another follow-up on the remittance. That's 60% to 70%. That's on core, I assume.

That's right, yeah. As it goes forward.

And then second, yeah, perfect. And second, just expected investment earnings, you know, was low this quarter. And I know there's so many things that go into that and modeling it is real tough. But, you know, is this 670, like what drove it down if there's one or two things? And then is this the new run rate, you know, that we should be thinking about in terms of expected investment earnings?

Hi, Doug. It's Trevor. Thanks for the question. So yes, in terms of expected investment spread, you're right. I think we would normally expect this to grow as our balance sheet grows, and you see this happening in Asia fairly consistently. In terms of the total company, the year-over-year decline is largely driven by the reinsurance transactions in the US and Canada, as well as the US basis change. The quarter-over-quarter decline was largely driven by some older sales in the U.S. We did some sales in anticipation of the recent agreement with RGA, and so that obviously had an impact as well. So I think quarter-to-quarter, to your point, there is some variability, but we do think that Q4 is an appropriate base to model total company quarterly expected investment spread going forward.

Perfect. Appreciate the color. Thanks.

Thank you. The next question is from Mario Mendonca from TD Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I thought this might be best for you. In response to that first question from Gabriel, we were talking about Asian growth, and there was a little more going on in Asia than just the CSM allocation that Gabriel referred to. There was just a lower tax rate. There was an allocation of investment income into Asia as well. So when you think about 2025, have you provided an outlook for growth as you have in the past for Asia? Is it still something around that 15% growth rate? And if so, does that contemplate the significant increase in the tax rate we'd expect in Asia in 2025?

Thanks, Mario. Great question. When I think about the outlook from a core earnings perspective for Asia, I do expect mid teens to be the sustainable rate of growth. That's consistent with the message we have provided at Investor Day and there's nothing for me to believe that 2025 would be any different to that medium term expectation. Now, in terms of the impact of global minimum tax, that sort of mid teens growth rate would be normalizing for the impact of global minimum taxes. But as Colin referenced earlier, we had already taken during 2024 taken the charge that we would expect to to incur in 2024 from the Canadian overlay of global minimum tax. So when we look at the know the allocation of that comparative down to our segments operating segments both Asia and GWAM that distortion which should be removed when you look at the comparative year on year and I'd expect to see sort of the mid-teens earnings growth it's really important under IFRS 17 and this is one of the reasons I like the earnings basis under IFRS 17 regardless of variability in sales that can happen from quarter to quarter and year to year i do expect earnings to be stable and growing and i think that's important in the context of some of the trends we're seeing in asia which is you know the emergence of new or newer distribution channels. There's a stronger relevance of third-party channels, broker channels, to supplement our traditional agency channels and bank assurance channels. And I think that's relevant because broker third-party channels does have the potential to be more variable to factors such as the competitive environment as well as regulatory changes. And if I look at our overall distribution mix across the region, About a third is coming from agency, a third is coming from bank assurance, and a third is coming from third-party channels.

Just as a quick follow-up, do you anticipate, and I know it's hard to do this, but do you anticipate any changes in 2025 related to CSM, allocation of investment income, into a segment like Asia or wealth management from other segments?

There's nothing that I'm aware of, Mario, that we anticipate on changing in 2025.

Thank you. The next question is from Lamar Persaud from Cormark. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. One quick question here just on the tax rate. Like, what's the core tax rate we should assume for 2025? And, you know, do you foresee more of these tax gains in wealth because, you know, two quarters in a row now?

Hi, Lamar. It's Colin here. that the tax when we set the new tax range of 17 to 23 we did that because we expected gmt to add two percentage points to our historic 15 to 20 two to three percentage points our historic 15 to 20 range so what we're finding now and gmt is relatively new is that there are some permanent uh differences we can apply to the pre-tax income before we apply the gmt charge so that is pushing our tax rate down towards more the 15 rate which is below the 17 to 23 that we we guided you to of course also you know more earnings coming out of hong kong is is helpful for the overall effective tax rate and and we see that continuing so we're gonna we're gonna continue seeing how GMT goes for the next few quarters and come back to you if our guidance changes. At the moment, we don't have any update for you, but there's no reason to believe that the 15% is a one-off effective tax rate.

Okay, that's helpful. And then my more fulsome question here, just credit loss is very low this quarter, kind of as expected, just given the timing of the end of Q4. But obviously, you know, as we start this year, there's all these talks about the impacts of tariffs and, you know, increased macroeconomic volatility. So I'm just wondering, can you talk to us about what we should expect as we look forward into Q1? Like, could there perhaps be a bigger stage one and two build as we look forward into Q1?

Yeah, thanks for the question, Lamar. I'll start and then I'll hand it to Trevor. And you're right, you know, the macroeconomic environment continues to be volatile. I would say that 24 was a year of macroeconomic volatility, and we're therefore not expecting 25 to be any different. You know, there's a lot of discussion around trade wars and what the impact of that will be. Trade wars are not good for anyone. Obviously, there will be an impact to GDP, inflation and unemployment, but it's hard to predict how that's going to unfold. I believe we are really well positioned to navigate a challenging environment in 25 as we did in 24. You could see from our results that we were able to deliver in a record earnings and sales despite the volatility and the uncertain markets we've done a lot over the last seven years to reduce our sensitivity to market movements significantly reducing our equity market sensitivity as well as our interest rate sensitivity um but obviously we're not going to be immune to any of the the negative impacts that you see from you know unemployment and inflation creeping up but but again i would say that our portfolio really positions us well to perspective, which is a source of strength that quite honestly I think has come through in our 2024 results for not only Q4 but the full year. But Trevor, you might want to elaborate a little bit more on credit in particular.

Yeah, thanks, Roy. Yeah, thanks, Lamar. Thanks for the question. So I would basically reiterate what Roy said. I think, you know, we've had strong credit experience for many years. The portfolio remains 96% investment grade. But, you know, credit losses are by their nature variable and lumpy. It wouldn't be a surprise to see some quarterly volatility depending on how this all actually plays out. I think to your question around Q1, I think it's probably too early to say. And so we would, I think, stick with the guidance that, you know, our 30 to 50 million a quarter remains inappropriate through the cycle run rate to use in your modeling.

Okay. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Thank you. The next question is from Tom McKinnon Tom McKinnon from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning. First question just for Colin here. I think you said the $7 billion remittances included $750 million from the Global Atlantic reinsurance transaction. How much did it include from the Canadian Universal Life reinsurance transaction that you did in 2024?

Hey, Tom. So we take a fairly conservative approach to remittance definition in Canada because we operate our liquidity out of our MLI entity where that transaction emanated. So the short answer is we didn't include any, there was no contribution to remittances from the Canadian universal life transaction.

Okay, thanks. Even though there was $800 million in potential capital release, it wasn't reflected in that $7 billion

It was capital relief, but not surplus creation.

Okay, great. Thanks for that. And second question is with respect to improved insurance experience. How sustainable is it? Phil made comments earlier in the call that he sees the improvement there in Asia as being sustainable. Maybe we can have Canada and the US talk about sustainability of the good insurance experience that we saw in the fourth quarter. A little bit of colour on that and what we should be thinking about going forward for that. Thanks.

Sure, Tom. It's Steve. Thanks for the question. And, you know, first off, we were very pleased with the experience that we saw in the quarter. Positive experience, both through the P&L and CSM and every insurance segment. So strong results overall. You know, in terms of maybe some of the drivers in terms of why we've seen the improved experience, Phil noted sustainability of the improvement in Asia. We had in the first half of the year and prior year some ongoing headwinds from Vietnam persistency, which we expected to normalize. And it has. So the past couple of quarters, we've been overall neutral in Vietnam experience. So that is sustainable. And then U.S. life that was another source of headwinds from the lapse experience and as you recall we had strengthened our our lapse assumptions in the U.S. in Q3 and that's we've seen as expected a material improvement in ongoing experience from that. In the quarter we did have a release of P&C provisions which we would not expect to be an ongoing uh, event that was about just over 45 million in the, uh, in the quarter. And then in Canada, we've seen, you know, we've seen ongoing, it varies a bit quarter to quarter, but very strong experience in our, uh, Canadian group benefits in the long-term disability business. We've got a very, very strong team that, uh, you know, oversees the claims and, you know, cautious in terms of calling ongoing performance, but the, the team continues to do a very good job. So that's, that's really the big picture.

Okay, thanks. And if I could just squeeze one more in, the 3% NCIB, I think the RGA deal, the loss of earnings there is $70 million. That would be about one-third of that 3% NCIB. I think you have used the term business as usual, share buybacks, and maybe you can provide us what that might necessarily mean and how we should be thinking about share buybacks going forward, especially the good cash and capital generation that you're seeing.

Yeah, thanks, Tom. You're right. Buybacks have been a key part of our strategy over many years, and we've created a lot of shareholder value through the buybacks. Since 2021, we've deployed about $8.8 billion towards buybacks, and that's generated an economic benefit of approximately $3 billion. In 2024, we bought back $3.5 billion, and we've always committed through the transactions that we've done to deploy the excess capital that we've generated towards buybacks at a minimum, and we've continued to do that. And in 2025, we've just announced a 3% repurchase of up to – is the RGA transaction. And the rest of that, approximately 2%, is what we would say is the incremental. I don't know if I'd use the word BAU because it assumes that it's a given every year, but the strong capital generation of the franchise and the strong remittability really does talk to the fact that we have this effective tool to create shareholder value whilst maintaining very strong capital ratios. Our like-out ratio of it, 137%. means that we've got $24 billion of capital in excess of our supervisory target and more than $10 billion above our internal operating range, and that's despite the buybacks. So, yes, we are very positive about the fact that we can continue to deploy capital towards buybacks whilst maintaining significant financial flexibility.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. And the next question is from Lamar Persaud from Cormark. Please go ahead.

Yeah, I appreciate you taking my follow-up. Just in response to the answer to Tom's question on insurance experience here, I appreciate it's a very tough question to answer, but I'm going to try it anyways. Sounds like, based on your response, it sounds like we should expect positive experience moving forward. Is that fair? If I look at and exclude Q4 and look at the average experience over the past two years, it was pretty much a dead neutral. So should we be modeling out positive experience moving forward? Is that kind of the takeaway there?

Thanks, Lamar. I'd be cautious to promise positive experience on a run rate basis. If you look at the past two quarters after the assumption update and you back out the P&C benefit that we got in Q4, we're roughly neutral. slight positive so you know I'm I'm really giving you my sort of expectations that you know it it's running pretty close to expectations with variability by business and you know the the caveat that we're in the very large case market in the U.S. on mortality so you'll expect variations but I look at that last half of the year as roughly neutral as you know as as a good run rate.

Appreciate it thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions registered at this time. I'd like to turn the meeting back over to Mr. Koh.

Thank you, operator. We will be available after the call if there are any follow-up questions. Have a good day, everyone.

Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.