International General Insurance - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Robin Sidders, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Robin Sidders (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Debbie, and good morning. Welcome to today's conference call. Today we'll be discussing our first quarter 2024 results. You will have seen our press release that we issued after the market closed yesterday. We can also get a copy of the press release on the investor section of our website at www.iginsure.com. We've also posted a supplementary investor presentation which can be found on the website as well, also in the investors section on the presentations page. On today's call are Executive Chairman of IGI, Wasef Jabsheh, President and CEO, Waleed Jabsheh, and Chief Financial Officer, Pervez Rizvi.

As always, Wasef will begin the call with some high-level comments before handing over to Waleed to talk you through the key drivers of the results for the quarter and finish up with our views on the market conditions and our outlook for the remainder of 2024. At that point, we'll open the call up for Q&A. Beforehand, I'll just go through the customary safe harbor language. Our speaker's remarks may contain forward-looking statements. Some of the forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words. We caution you that such forward-looking statements should not be regarded as a representation by us that the future plans, estimates, or expectations contemplated by us will, in fact, be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions.

Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors, including the risk factors set out in the company's annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31st, 2023, and the company's reports on Form 6-K and other filings with the SEC, as well as our results press release issued yesterday evening. We undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date they are made. During this call, we will use certain non-GAAP financial measures for reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure. Please see our earnings press release which has been filed with the SEC and is also available on our website. With that. Jabsheh.

Wasef Jabsheh (Executive Chairman)

Thank you, Robin, and good day to everybody. Thank you for joining us on today's call. I'll just make a few short remarks before handing the call over to Waleed. We had an excellent start to 2024, as you can see from our results that we issued last night. Once again, we posted a combined ratio in the 70s, a return on average equity of 27.6%, and a core operating return on average equity of 29.6%. We grew our book value per share by 1.5% on top of the more than 36% in 2023. Waleed can go into more detail on what's behind these numbers. As you know, our primary focus is managing the cycles that are inherent in our business.

One of the hallmarks for IGI is our deep technical underwriting talent, people who understand the dynamics of their business, who have strong relationships, and who can anticipate shifting tides in their markets and respond accordingly. Our business does not move in near-synchronous different lines, and markets move at different times and at different paces. What's most important at any stage of a cycle is that we maintain our discipline, execute consistently, and move our capital to those areas with the strongest rate momentum and the highest margins, and always work within our risk appetite and tolerances. This is exactly what we are doing today. Throughout our 22-year history, we have consistently demonstrated our ability to do this while producing high-quality results for the capital that is entrusted to us by our shareholders.

Our markets remain broadly positive overall, more so in insurance and some of our core specialty lines, and a little more challenging in others. It is natural to see more competition in those lines where conditions are strong and risk appetite is increasing. I'm confident 2024 will represent more opportunities for IGI to seize that will both expand and diversify our footprint and generate profitable results as we continue to build on our very solid foundation. We will continue to actively and efficiently manage our capital, deploying it first to underwriting opportunities and then returning excess capital to shareholders as we have demonstrated in recent quarters and years. I will now hand over to Waleed who will discuss the first quarter results in more detail and talk about market conditions and our outlook for the remainder of 2024. I'll remain on the call for any questions at the end. Waleed.

Waleed Jabsheh (President and CEO)

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today, and thank you, Wasef. As Wasef said, I mean, we've had a very strong start to the year with really solid results. We started the year with relatively healthy but some more challenging conditions, and it's fair to say that we are responding quickly and decisively to the changes we're seeing in our markets. Today, this year, we've had a relatively active loss environment from a natural catastrophe perspective, and this has carried into the second quarter with the earthquake in Taiwan and the flooding in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, along with some storms in the U.S. of course.

We also witnessed a major market loss, potentially in the billions dollars and potentially the largest ever marine loss when the container ship Dali collided with Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, which resulted in its collapse. And as we've said in prior quarters, we're seeing an increasing degree of polarization, heightened tensions in many parts in many parts of the world, and we expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. We're working on some specific initiatives undertaking to continue growing and strengthening our company, specifically our new Lloyd's presence that we just announced this morning, further growing and diversifying our reinsurance portfolio, adding talent across our our offices and teams, and expanding geographic spread of our products. I'll elaborate on these a little bit more later in the call.

So now I'll just give a quick recap of the results for the first quarter, and I'll talk more about our outlook for the market and for us for the remainder of 2024. As I said, our markets are still relatively healthy, although as we've noted in prior quarters, we're seeing more competitive pressures, mixed rating environment, mixed market conditions. From an overall rating perspective, we're not seeing and consequently not benefiting from the larger rate increases I've seen in recent years, but we are still within positive territory overall and across many of our business lines. Given the very healthy conditions at the start of last year, there's definitely a greater degree of competition among existing players who are wanting to show more growth and are expanding their risk appetites.

But on the positive side, I mean, we're not really seeing this coming from new capital entering the market. It's more from existing players getting hungry. For IGI, gross premium growth in the first quarter was almost 4.5%. This is on top of the significant growth we saw in the same quarter of last year. Similar to the patterns of the past several quarters, growth coming from both the short-tail and reinsurance segments, but mostly from the reinsurance portfolio which grew 21% compared to the first quarter of 2023. In the short-tail segment, we're seeing good opportunities for growth as well, particularly in lines such as engineering, contingency, property, and marine cargo. Gross premiums in the first quarter in this segment were up 2.8%, but were impacted by some timing issues, and I'm happy to expand on that in the Q&A session.

Long-tail segment saw some contraction in gross premium in the first quarter as rates and conditions are reaching levels where we are choosing to non-renew some mid non-renew some business at this time. Given that our long-tail book is different to many of our competitors, as you all know, we don't write any U.S. business, the pace of rating decline and adequacy of business for us is a little more measured than the broad market commentary we've been hearing. The decline in gross premiums was also somewhat distorted as a result of our decision to put our IDI portfolio, the inherent defects portfolio, into runoff as returns were just not meeting our requirements. You'll recall the significant growth we've experienced in this segment over the years since about 2018. That was to take advantage of the strong conditions and a healthy rating environment.

And now that the long-tail lines have had several consecutive quarters of rating decline, albeit from, you know, very quite high levels, we have been and continue to take a more cautious view here. That's all part of our prudent cycle management. Lastly, and I've said this many times before, one quarter is not a trend. We expect growth for the full year of 2024 to be in the high single digits to low double digits. There are still opportunities to grow, but maybe just perhaps less of them compared to previous years. I'll talk more later on about our growth initiatives. Specifically on the first quarter losses I mentioned a moment ago, our share of those losses, they were relatively small and very manageable.

On the Baltimore Bridge, we've taken a very conservative view on this based on our total exposure and fully reserved for this event in Q1, which we expect to be more than that. Our combined ratio of 74.1% was well below our long-term average and an excellent result. This included eight points of higher favorable development than the favorable development recorded in the first quarter of last year. Net investment income, similar to past several quarters, showed significant improvement in Q1, when compared to the same period the year before. This resulted in a 0.7-point improvement in the annualized investment yield to 4.2% for the first quarter. Specifically in our fixed income portfolio, we maintained overall average rating at A, average duration at 3.1 years.

Net income for the first quarter was just under $38 million compared to just under $34 million in the first quarter a year ago. This increase was driven by a higher level of underwriting income on a larger portfolio as well as a $3 million increase in net investment income, all those being offset by $5.6 million of higher net forex losses and higher general administrative expenses, mostly relating to adding new talent across our teams. Core operating income, which we believe is a truer measure of fundamental performance, was $40 million in the first quarter of this year, representing an increase of more than 35% versus $29 million in the first quarter of last year.

On the G&A expense ratio, which was 3.3 points higher in the first quarter when compared to the same period a year ago, we do expect it to be running a little higher in the near term as IGI continues to grow in numbers. We're now more than 400, almost 425 people across the group. In addition to supplementing talent across our offices, we've also been taking the important step of replacing what were previously outsourced roles with dedicated in-house teams, providing greater control and efficiency on our side. Turning to the balance sheet, total assets increased a little over 2% to $1.88 billion, and total equity increased a little over 3% to $557 million at the end of Q1. The second tranche of earnout shares totaling 600,000 with a vesting threshold of $12.75 vested during the first quarter.

In total, today, 2 million earnout shares are vested, and a little over 1 million remain with vesting thresholds of $14 and $16.25. On the capital management front, we continue to repurchase our common shares under our existing 5 million share repurchase authorization, and we now have around 1 million shares remaining under the existing shares. As always, as Wasef and as Wasef mentioned a moment ago, our priority is underwriting first, and where we have capital in excess of the opportunities to to work in underwriting, we will return it to shareholders. You will recall we announced a special dividend of $0.50 per share alongside the regular quarterly dividend of $0.01 per share during the first quarter, which meant that our equity was impacted by a payout of just under $24 million during Q1.

Ultimately, we recorded a core operating ROE of just shy of 30% for the first quarter compared to 27.9% in the same period last year, and we grew our book value per share by 1.5% to $12.58 at March 31st. So all in, excuse me. A very solid quarter and start to the year with a few moving pieces. But we continue to be optimistic about 2024. Just moving on to our markets for a bit, we're seeing a continuation of the trends that we saw during 2023. Opportunities, though, are still very much prevalent across much of our portfolio, but momentum is slow. As I noted a moment ago, we expect to see a growth rate of around high single digits to low double digit percentages, which I'll say a few more words about in a moment.

Overall, I think, you know, we're in that critical transitional phase where cycle management levels levers come into play, and this is where we are most effective. We are shifting or increasing our focus on those areas with better conditions, higher returns, or returns that meet our profitability and risk return thresholds, and we're reducing or moving away from areas that no longer meet those thresholds. This is exactly the type of market where we can demonstrate our strengths. And as we've always said, we're very much technical underwriters here at IGI, and the conditions we're seeing today are all about technical underwriting and smart risk selection.

When we think about the short-tail segment, we're most encouraged by opportunities in engineering, property, contingency, and marine cargo, but other lines like aviation and upstream energy are definitely more challenging. Engineering and construction continues to be a bright spot for us in many of our markets, including the Middle East and Asia, and we're expanding teams and our underwriting expertise across many offices, most recently in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. As you know, we've entered the U.S. construction market and will continue to build our presence there while always staying well within our risk appetite, of course, mindful of cat exposures. In our treaty reinsurance business, our reinsurance segment, we saw net rate improvements of more than 70% in the first quarter on the back of 25%+ increases last year.

This, this is by far the most attractive area of our portfolio right now, and there continues to be plenty of opportunities to write new business. We, of course, are exploring ways to diversify this book and, expand specially our, our specialty, reinsurance footprint, which historically had not made up a significant proportion of our portfolio. We expect this, book of business to continue to grow in proportion to our overall, book for the foreseeable future as conditions remain positive. In the long-tail segment, where it's a rate, we don't write any U.S. business. Rates continue to follow the past several quarters, trending downward, but mostly in an orderly manner. Overall, net rates remain broadly adequate. But again, like other areas of our business, there's much variation by line. Where rates are not adequate, we're walking away from business.

And one thing I would note, I would not expect to see much growth in this segment in 2024. Turning to our geographic markets, rates in the U.S. continue to outpace all other markets in the lines of writing. Again, all short-tail lines, including property, energy, PV, terror, and contingency. And this remains a big growth area for us. In the first quarter of the year, we've written just over $34 million in gross premium in the U.S., and that represents about 35% growth over the same period last year. We expect to benefit from our entry into the U.S. construction market, as I noted earlier, but we're going at it cautiously, writing small to medium-sized projects with manageable policy periods, managed cat exposures, quite varying from the way we write the international construction book.

In Europe, where we wrote over $22 million in Q1, versus about $19 million in the same quarter last year, we do expect to see further opportunities to show growth throughout the year, especially given our new Oslo platform where we've bolstered our underwriting team to expand our presence and relationships in the Nordic markets, specifically focusing at this time on professional and financial lines. I've covered other opportunities in other areas already, like engineering in the Middle East and Asia, so I'm not going to go back over that. I am particularly excited about our announcement this morning that we've established a presence at Lloyd's, Lloyd's of London with a company box, and we begin trading tomorrow.

We're offering a number of lines of business, property, energy, contingency, political violence, ports and terminals, and marine cargo, as well as various long-tail lines, including marine liability, professional indemnity, and financial institutions. Our underwriting teams will be there and operate on a rotational basis. While our offices on Lime Street here in London are just a stone's throw away from the Lloyd's building, having the center of the London market at Lloyd's offers us a significant opportunity for us to build on the profile, the presence, and more importantly, benefit from the additional distribution opportunities that Lloyd's brings. Everything we're doing today and the significant enhancements we have made over the past several years are what continue to strengthen our solid foundation.

We've grown and diversified our company, focused on our core, core principles of selective and disciplined underwriting with dynamic cycle management and cautious reserving, with the ultimate goal of protecting the profitability profile of our company and the capital that is entrusted to us. We've generated excellent results that will serve us well in the quarters and years ahead and allow us to continue to deliver on our promises to all stakeholders. So I'm going to pause here, and we'll turn it over for questions. Operator, we're ready to take the first question, please.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.

Our first question comes from Alan Chen with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Hey, thanks. I'm on for Scott this morning. My first question will be, reserves. So it looks like the reserve release in the first quarter was very strong. Can you maybe provide more colors on the 19.4 points favorable development we see there, and does that change your view on the reserve release for the next few quarters? Thanks.

Waleed Jabsheh (President and CEO)

Hi, Alan. Thanks for the question. I think the reserve releases, yes, they were healthy in Q1. I think that's a reflection of our cautious, you know, approach to reserving, as we mentioned every quarter. But it's also a reflection of the year that we had last year.

I mean, 2023 was, you know, very much, you know, one of the more benign years from a cat exposure perspective or cat loss perspective or severe cat loss perspective, and also even from a large loss perspective for us. So that has resulted in the release of this level of reserves. Our approach continues to be cautious, will always be, and in markets like this, we expect, you know, a continuation. Very difficult to tell the level going forward, but, you know, in an environment like this, releases are expected to continue.

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Okay. Thanks. That's very helpful. And then my second question will be on the short-tail line. So it appears there's been more competition in the space, as you mentioned. And can you maybe expand more on the competitive landscape that you see there?

Maybe if you can touch on the reinsurance segment as well. Thanks.

Wasef Jabsheh (Executive Chairman)

Thank you. So sorry. Was that short-tail?

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Yeah. Can you briefly maybe expand on the short-tail line and maybe talk about the competitive landscape that you see there? And then if you could also talk about reinsurance segment as well, that'll be helpful.

Wasef Jabsheh (Executive Chairman)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So I'll start with the short-tail. We've always said and 2023 was a reflection of that as well. You know, it's fairly mixed. It's mixed by line of business, by territory. Again, the U.S. is definitely the best area for short-tail business for us. But the strongest are probably currently on the political violence side, the onshore energy side. The rest are fairly modest.

You know, this segment saw net rate movements in Q1 of just under 3%, which is, you know, marginal in our opinion, and relatively flat. But areas such as, you know, aviation, were definitely under a lot of pressure, and our book is actually shrinking in that line of business. If you turn to the reinsurance side of things, I mean, this is as we said in the call, this is by far the most exciting part of what we do. We practically doubled our book last year, and that portfolio in the first quarter has grown by a further 20%-21%. I think, you know, you're not getting the same level of rate increases and rate movements or in this year as you saw last year.

However, the market looks to remain disciplined to a certain extent. Although, as we mentioned, I mean, after the year that the market and the industry did have last year, especially the reinsurance players, there, you are seeing a lot more hunger this year than you did last year. And so people are wanting a bigger piece of the pie. So that's just something we have to deal with. But, you know, the opportunities are abundant, plenty. Historically, our book of business has been more focused on that non-marine, property, including cat book.

But we've now, you know, expanded that into areas, such as, you know, political violence, aviation, cyber, and we're looking to bring in and expand the team to further diversify and grow, especially the size of the portfolio, which, you know, historically has not made a big proportion of the overall book. So definitely the most exciting part of what we're

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

got it. Thanks.

Wasef Jabsheh (Executive Chairman)

Most exciting segment of what? Yeah, go ahead.

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Yeah. Thanks. If I can, maybe ask one more. So, looks like the investment yield went up during the quarter, and I noticed that your cash balance went down by like $30 million. Can you provide additional colors on where you deployed the cash and what opportunities that you might see there? Thanks.

Waleed Jabsheh (President and CEO)

The cash balance is just a reflection of where we place the money from an investment perspective. I mean, our investment approach and appetite has not changed. We continue to focus on fixed deposits, and the bonds portfolio, and the bonds fixed income, fixed deposit, portfolio. So it's just a matter of making sure any cash lying around is put to good use. Thanks.

Alan Chen (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Got it. Thanks for answering my questions.

Waleed Jabsheh (President and CEO)

Pleasure. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Waleed Jabsheh (President and CEO)

Thank you. Thank you all for joining us today, and thank you for your continued support of IGI. If you have any additional questions, please contact Robin, and she'll be happy to assist. We look forward to speaking with you on the next quarter's call.

I wish everybody a great day.