Prudential - Earnings Call - H2 2023

Transcript

Anil Wadhwani (CEO)

Hi, I'm Anil Wadhwani, CEO of Prudential. I'm delighted to present our 2023 full-year results. In 2023, we delivered excellent financial and operational performance. We produced high-quality growth on the back of a marked rebound in agency, and I am pleased with our focus on meticulous operational execution, with several of our businesses growing their market share. Sales growth has continued in the first two months of 2024, and we are seeing measurable progress in the relentless execution of our strategy.

There is a lot more to do as we replicate success at pace and scale to deliver best-in-class customer experiences, enhance activation, productivity, and penetration across our distribution channels, and to unlock the tremendous opportunity in health. We are deploying capital in new business at attractive rates of return. Across our three strategic pillars, we are enhancing our core capabilities through a billion-dollar investment program and expanding our distribution.

We are increasingly confident in achieving both our strategic as well as our financial objectives that we set out last year. New business profits have grown by 45% to $3.1 billion. Twelve markets grew by double digits, demonstrating the strength of our multi-market and our multi-channel platform. Growth was led by Hong Kong, but there were notable performances in Malaysia and Indonesia and several other businesses within our growth market segment. Importantly, we delivered high-quality growth and compounding earnings.

We were able to grow APE sales by 37% while improving our margins, increasing new business investment by a third, generating around $4 of value for every $1 invested. We delivered 8% growth in IFRS earnings and a 17% increase in embedded value operating profit. This drove embedded value up 7% to $45 billion. The strategy we launched at the end of August last year is clear and simple. We believe executing on this provides an unmatched opportunity to accelerate value creation for all our stakeholders: our people, our customers, our shareholders, and importantly, our communities.

I would now like to give you an update on our strategic pillars, starting with customers. We are committed to delivering remarkable customer experiences to drive higher acquisition and loyalty for lifetime value creation. We have standardized our approach to measuring and analyzing customer advocacy, focused around net promoter scores. We have seen good initial traction. In eight out of our 10 businesses, we have moved up at least one quartile or maintained a top quartile ranking. This success has been initiative-led. For example, in Malaysia, we launched our new all-in-one customer servicing portal, PRUServices, which offers enhanced and more efficient policy servicing.

We intend to roll this out across all our major markets during the course of this year. We have been working hard on customer retention. In 2023, we had headwinds in Vietnam as a challenging Bancassurance landscape negatively impacted consumer confidence. We see this dip as transitory and are confident in achieving our 2027 success matrix, a 90%-95% customer retention rate, and also top quartile net promoter scores in 10 of our businesses. Now on to the lifeblood of our company, Agency. Our franchise is recognized both for its scale and the focus we employ on quality. We have, on average, 68,000 monthly active agents and over $9,000 million Round Table Qualifiers.

Our Agency business had a tremendous year, with new business profits growing by 75%. Clearly, the Hong Kong border reopening was a big factor, but agency across the group performed very well. We increased our health and protection new business profits and improved our margin. The two focus areas for us are activation and productivity. The number of active agents per month grew by 3%, and the productivity increased by 59%. Many initiatives sit behind this, including; focused recruitment of high-quality agents through the utilization of our specialist career switching program, where agents are on average six times more productive in their first year than some of the other recruits.

We continue to develop PRUForce, our technology-driven distribution platform for agents. Across the 115,000 users that we have been able to onboard, we are seeing an average productivity uplift of around 30%. Agents using PRULeads, our digital leads management system, have converted 8% of leads into sales. Complementing our agency channel is Bancassurance. Following a strong result in 2022, the Bancassurance channel continues to provide us with the benefits of diversification, reach, and scale.

We saw growth in many of our markets, with half of our life markets recording double-digit growth in new business profits. However, two markets, China and Vietnam, saw significant challenges. Excluding these markets, our Bancassurance new business profits grew by 23% year-on-year. We want to deepen our Bancassurance customer penetration. To achieve this, we are using data-driven customer targeting and broadening the product propositions available.

In 2023, our bank customer penetration continued to be around 8%. Our target is to be in the region of 9%-11%. Our focus on value and aligning of incentives led to a percentage point increase in the proportion of health and protection products, but there is more work to be done to reach our target sales mix of 10%.

We were delighted to sign CIMB bancassurance partnership in Thailand earlier this year and will look to other key partnerships to further our reach and scale across our ASEAN markets. In health, we believe there are enormous opportunities to unlock across our markets. We seek to play a much-needed role in coordinating the healthcare journeys of our customers by becoming a trusted partner. In February, we appointed Arjan Toor as the CEO of our health business, a critical step towards providing the leadership to transform our health business model.

Arjan has joined us from Cigna Healthcare, having worked extensively in Asia and Europe, and has begun working with local partners to drive the delivery of our health strategy. Early progress has already been made through the introduction of disciplined pricing reviews in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the increasing use of technology to manage claims.

For example, the use of AI to reduce "Fraud, Waste, and Abuse". We still have lots more work to do in order to implement best practices at scale across all our key markets and achieve our goal of doubling 2022 health new business profits in 2027. But I'm very pleased with the 20% growth, which is a very good start that we saw in 2023. To accelerate value creation, we have three group-wide enablers, which are already supporting the delivery of initiatives within our strategic pillars.

Starting with technology, we are building an open architecture platform that delivers a uniform user experience so that we can execute more consistently at pace and at scale across all our markets. We are developing data platforms so that we can increasingly deploy advanced analytics and AI for high-value purposes. For example, we use generative AI in Malaysia to help our call center agents shorten customer inquiry response times, and in Indonesia, we are using this to review hospital claims. Not only does this support the customer's experience in these markets, but these are scalable initiatives that we can roll out to call centers across our life markets.

Our investment in technology will also translate into other measurable benefits. At the same time, we are also looking at driving efficiencies, rationalizing the number of applications by almost half. We will do so by switching to a more modular and a more standardized way of developing our applications. Secondly, our people and our culture. We continue to intensify our capability build. Through our targeted development programs, we have internally promoted some of our finest talent into critical roles and have onboarded senior strategic hires to further strengthen our bench.

We are committed to a high-performance culture that delivers exceptional outcomes for all our stakeholders. To reinforce our culture, we have also launched a new performance and reward model that is aligned to both our strategy, but importantly, to the values of our company. And finally, wealth and investments. We are leveraging our in-house asset manager, Eastspring, in three ways;

Firstly, we have been focused on improving our investment performance. In 2023, 50% of assets under management outperformed their benchmark on a three-year basis. Secondly, providing training and development and distribution support to our top agents and financial advisors to better serve the wealth needs of our customers.

In Singapore, we have begun to streamline our offering and build a scalable platform by launching Prudential Financial Advisors and, at the same time, establishing a Wealth Academy. We plan to double the number of advisors in this market over the next 12 months, and thirdly, as a responsible asset owner and manager supporting a just and inclusive transition, we are committed to net zero by 2050 and targeting a 55% reduction in our weighted average carbon intensity by 2030.

Last year, we told you how we would define and measure our success, and while we remain in the early stages of our strategy execution, we are already executing at pace and scale and are increasingly confident of delivering across all our pillars and enablers. I would now like to draw out some of the operational performance highlights across our multi-market growth engines. Ben Bulmer, our CFO, will go through the financial performance of these markets in greater detail in his section.

Firstly, in Hong Kong, we delivered an exceptional performance with new business profits over three times higher than the prior year as the borders reopened and the economy recovered strongly. I'm pleased that it was across both domestic and the mainland Chinese visitors that contributed towards this strong performance. In agency, we increased the number of active agents, improved their productivity, and hired 4,000 new agents. This contributed to almost a four-fold increase in agency new business profits. In bancassurance, where new business profits grew by 93%, we have increased the proportion of sales from new to Prudential customers.

We have also improved our product mix with a higher proportion of sales from the higher margin health and protection products. I'm really pleased to see that the sales growth has continued in the first two months of 2024. We are confident in the strength of our franchise and the continuing demand of our products and services as the Hong Kong economy continues to strengthen. We see considerable opportunities to broaden our relationships given 60% of the sales were to new to Prudential customers. With an expected increase in mainland Chinese visitors and the ongoing demand for the health infrastructure in Hong Kong, with the visitor customers, signals to the ongoing potential that Hong Kong has to offer.

Now, turning to the Chinese mainland, where 2023 was a year of transition for us, we took proactive actions to rebalance our product mix at the start of the Q2, and the regulatory guidance on the guaranteed products in many ways ratified our decision. We had to make the necessary adjustments to our product suite that's offered through the Bancassurance channels to conform to the new guidelines. While new business profits were lower, we have improved the underlying margins of our Bancassurance business as well as demonstrated progress on shifting the product mix.

Agency new business profit and sales, on the other hand, showed strong growth last year. We saw a 6% increase in new recruits and a 26% increase in productivity as we continue to build our high-quality agency workforce. We are focused on offering capital-efficient long-term savings protection and retirement products to our affluent and advanced affluent customers in tier one and tier two cities. We'll continue to deepen the penetration into the customer base of our existing bank partners as we look to add new bank partners. Having repositioned the business in 2023, going forward, we expect growth in both agency and Bancassurance channels. The structural growth drivers remain intact, and we continue to see substantial growth opportunities in the Chinese mainland.

That is why we are investing capital to support our growth ambition in China. Moving to ASEAN markets, we continue to see significant growth opportunities underpinned by multiple structural demand drivers. Our history, strong brand, broad reach, together with our leading multi-channel distribution platform, provides us exceptional access to the largest economies in the region. We have a top three position in eight out of the nine markets in ASEAN. These markets contributed to 37% of our new business profits and 43% of our embedded value in 2023. Turning to some of the key operational highlights.

In Singapore, we are one of the market leaders in health, protection, savings, and investments. 2023 was a challenging operating environment, particularly in the first half of the year due to higher interest rates. However, the business delivered a strong rebound in new business profit growth in the second half of the year, driven by the quality of our multi-channel distribution. Our financial advisory channel has had a promising start, and we intend to rapidly expand our workforce. In Malaysia, we have one of the leading franchises across conventional and Takaful, and are proud to be celebrating 100 years of our presence in this very important market for us.

In 2023, we saw impressive growth in both new business profits and APE sales. Our agency force is one of the largest in the country, and we retained our market leadership position in bancassurance. We see Malaysia as an attractive market for further investment, and we are looking forward to expanding our distribution and our customer reach. Next to Indonesia, where we are a leading player in both the traditional and Sharia sectors, particularly in agency. We saw four consecutive quarters of new business profit growth, a 12% increase in the number of active agents, and a 7% increase in agent productivity.

Our ongoing transformation will continue at pace, and this includes upgrading our sales management model and our training programs, and at the same time, redesigning our compensation schemes. Meanwhile, we remain very focused on opportunities to further diversify our distribution. Moving to Vietnam. Despite a challenging environment, we gained market share and maintained our number one position in this important market. This was due to the strength of a diversified platform as well as the strength of our agency channel.

Next, in India, where we are very excited on the long-term potential of this market and have a strong franchise across both life and asset management with our partner, ICICI. The business reported $1.1 billion of new APE sales on a 100% basis for 2023. ICICI Prudential has a track record of increasing margins, and we see a clear path for further expansion. On the asset management side, ICICI Prudential Asset Management is a leading player with a 12.5% market share, managing $79 billion of assets. Looking further ahead in Africa, where we have a diversified and a multi-channel distribution platform, and we expect Africa's contribution to the group to grow over a period of time. Our strategy is to focus and deploy our capital into the highest value markets where we have the strongest competitive advantage.

In closing, In 2023, Prudential generated high-quality growth and delivered an excellent financial and operational performance. We are very well positioned to capture the significant opportunities ahead of us. Our focus is on relentless execution of our new strategy, and we are already seeing measurable progress. We are increasingly confident in achieving both our financial and our strategic objectives. And finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to our people and to our partners for the quality and the focus that they have employed on the execution of our strategy in 2023. Thank you.

Ben Bulmer (CFO)

Today, we've announced our full year 2023 results. In my presentation, I will summarize our key messages before covering our 2023 financials, focusing on value generation, capital, and IFRS, and then finally provide a brief update on progress towards our 2027 financial objectives.

In summary, our excellent 2023 financial performance demonstrates the group's ability to deliver strong growth in value, compounding earnings, and the conversion of that value into cash. The group new business profit, or NBP, was up 45%, with 12 markets growing double-digit. Strong NBP growth drove embedded value per share up 7% to $16.43 or GBP 12.89. Our gross capital generation was in line with the trajectory we set out in August at $2.7 billion. We are highly disciplined in the allocation of that capital, prioritizing investment in organic new business and building our capabilities to enhance growth at high rates of return.

Further capital deployment in inorganic opportunities will be tested against capital returns to shareholders. Consistent with our capital allocation priorities, $0.7 billion was invested in writing profitable new business and a further $0.1 billion in enhancing our core capabilities. The majority of the balance was remitted to the group center. Overall, Group IFRS operating profit was up 8%. Additionally, strong new business performance drove CSM growth of 9% on an underlying basis, building our stock of future earnings.

The Group's capital position remains very robust, with a shareholder cover ratio of 295%. The full year dividend is up 9% at the top end of the guidance range we provided. Finally, as Anil said in his presentation, sales growth has continued in the first two months of the year. These results and our relentless execution of our strategy mean we are increasingly confident in achieving our strategic and financial objectives, delivering growth, capital generation, and building capability. I'll now move to focus on our value generation in 2023. The group delivered new business profit of $3.1 billion, up 45%.

This performance again highlights the strength of our diversified multi-channel and multi-product strategy. By channel, NBP growth was driven by a powerful rebound in agency, up 75%, offsetting challenges in the Bancassurance channel in the Chinese mainland and Vietnam. Excluding these markets, Bancassurance NBP was up 23%. While agency was clearly very strong, we continue to see great value in the resilience of our diversified distribution platform, exemplified during the pandemic period when the Bancassurance channel drove growth while agency was more disrupted.

From a product perspective, health and protection NBP was up 34% year-on-year. NBP from savings products was up 54%. Group new business margins expanded 3% points to 53%, reflecting a favourable shift in business mix. Overall, interest rate movements were only a minor headwind to margin over the year. Similarly, while not every geography grew, we benefit from the strength of our multi-market model. Within the 6 operating segments shown here, 17 out of our 22 life markets grew new business profits, 12 at a double-digit rate. I'll now turn to the key drivers underlying the performance of our larger markets.

Hong Kong was clearly a standout performer in 2023, delivering 1.4 billion of new business profits. This reflects a very strong performance in both the mainland Chinese visitor segment and also in our domestic business. Our 2023 APE from mainland Chinese visitor business was above 2019 pre-pandemic levels, with strong demand for both savings and health and protection products. Our domestic business also performed strongly, delivering year-on-year growth in every quarter despite progressively tougher 2022 comparators, with an overall growth of 36% year-on-year.

In combination, this resulted in a near four-fold increase in overall Hong Kong APE to $2 billion. The very substantial increase in Hong Kong NBP to $1.4 billion reflects both volume growth and the benefit of an improving business mix, resulting in an increasing new business margin over the second half of the year. Starting with the MCV business, following the border reopening in February, we saw the impact of substantial pent-up demand driving very high savings-related sales volumes in March and April.

Over the rest of the year, volumes moderated, with the average mainland Chinese visitor case size trending down from an initial peak of over $21,000 to around $17,000 by the end of the year. At the same time, the proportion of higher margin health and protection policies increased over the course of the year. Within the Bancassurance channel, for example, management actions increased the proportion of health and protection sales in the overall sales mix to 15%, a key part of our broader strategy.

The combined effect of these trends was a steady increase in the share of health and protection policies within the overall new sales mix, shown on the top right chart, resulting in a higher new business margin as we move through the year, illustrated on the bottom right chart. Turning to the Chinese mainland, 2023 was a year of transition for our joint venture, CPL, as we repositioned the business for sustainable long-term growth, with APE down 36% and NBP down 40%. Agency delivered a strong performance, with new sales consistently growing in both the first and second half of the year, reflecting an increase in the productivity of our agents and a high agent activation rate.

Our Bancassurance channel was significantly affected, as Anil covered in his presentation, by proactive management actions to rebalance sales mix between whole life products, higher margin annuity, and longer premium payment term products. In the second half of the year, this channel was then further affected by new regulation on sales expense control, which required product reapproval. Despite this, management actions taken on product mix improved new business margins in the second half of the year.

This was driven by an 8% point improvement in the Bancassurance margin, lifting overall margins by 6% points, ex-economics. In 2024, we expect growth from both our agency and Bancassurance channels. We continue to see a tremendous growth opportunity in the Chinese mainland, and this is why we, along with our joint venture partner, have agreed to provide additional capital support to fund CPL's next phase of high-quality growth. Outside Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia together represented over 50% of the group's new business profits.

Starting in Singapore, we saw improved momentum over the second half of 2023, with the NBP margin up by 17% points compared to the first half. This reflects a significant pickup in health and protection and growth in high-quality regular premium savings driven by the agency channel. Moving to Malaysia, we have a well-positioned and diversified business. In 2023, we saw encouraging momentum in agency and Bancassurance. Agency focused on higher margin protection business, resulting in a slightly lower APE, but a 10% productivity improvement. Overall, NBP grew 8%.

Finally, in Indonesia, our 2023 performance was pleasing, with NBP up 16%. This was driven by an acceleration in agency channel growth, supported by a number of actions, including repricing. While there is further work to do in delivering our ongoing transformation program, the Indonesian market remains a huge structural growth opportunity. The $3.1 billion of NBP generated last year added over 7% to our opening embedded value balance and over 10% to the opening value of in-force. Operating profit was up 17%, reflecting higher NBP, higher asset management profit, and lower central costs.

These factors more than offset a lower expected return, which was impacted by economic movements in 2022 and changes in assumptions and experience variances, which were negative $0.3 billion. The latter reflects the investment of over $100 million of the $1 billion investment in capabilities across our strategic pillars of distribution, customer, and health, and additionally temporal unfavourable experience in medical reimbursement products, coupled with elevated lapses in Vietnam, reflecting negative consumer sentiment across the Vietnamese insurance industry.

Growth in the embedded value operating result increased the operating return on embedded value to 10% from 9% year-on-year, and our closing 2023 embedded value totalled $45.3 billion, of which we expect over $9 billion, approximately one-third of our existing VIF balance, to monetize by the end of 2027. Turning to capital, our regulatory capital position is strong and resilient, and the shareholder cover ratio is broadly stable year on year at 295%.

The Group's financial flexibility continues to improve, with Group free surplus stock of $8.5 billion, holding company cash at $3.5 billion, and a financial leverage ratio at the lower end of our usual operating range. In short, the group is well placed to invest in the growth opportunities ahead. We referred to this chart in August, which summarizes the key operational and financial drivers of our value creation. We are highly disciplined in the allocation of capital, prioritizing new business at attractive rates of return and investing in building core capabilities.

We are increasingly focused on managing the conversion of value of in force into operating free surplus. This all supports compounding capital generation. Further capital deployment opportunities are compared against returning capital to shareholders. We have a considerable pipeline of potential strategic inorganic investments, such as new Bancassurance arrangements, bolt-on acquisitions, and partnerships supporting our health ambitions.

This slide demonstrates our business model in action. The left-hand chart shows the value compounding effect of profitable life new business cohorts driving growth in expected capital generation. This increased the expected 2023 capital generation from $1.5 billion at the end of 2017 to $2.7 billion at the end of 2022, despite relatively muted sales growth over the same period. This value, the $2.7 billion, emerged as life free surplus in 2023, which, with the investment return on existing free surplus, came to $2.9 billion.

Of this, as I explained earlier, we invested $0.7 billion in additional profitable new business, generating $3.1 billion of new business profits and a further $0.1 billion into strengthening our capabilities. The bulk of the remaining balance, $1.4 billion, was remitted to the group center. This equates to a remittance ratio in relation to life operating free surplus generation of about 80%, above the average of 60% over the last five years. We will be disciplined in bringing up capital, which is not needed at a business unit level.

The upstream from the life business, along with the remittance from Eastspring, was used to pay shareholder dividends, redeem debt, meet central costs, and further strengthen our capacity for future growth. I'll now turn to our financial performance from an IFRS perspective, with the completion of our first reporting year under the new IFRS17 standard. Profitable new business is the key driver of the development of our contractual service margin, or CSM, which in turn drives growth in insurance profit.

Excluding economic and other variances, CSM growth was 9% at the top end of the 6%-9% range previously indicated and represents a net addition of $1.7 billion. The negative economic and other variance effects reflect the mechanical impacts of interest rate and equity market movements on VFA-related business, and of course the future element of the operating variances I covered earlier. The release to the P&L came to $2.2 billion, equivalent to an amortization or release rate of 9.5%.

The overall insurance operating profit of $3.2 billion was stable year-on-year, driven by the CSM release and the net investment result. The latter was down 2% year on year as the impact of a lower opening investment balance was partially offset by additions from new business and renewal premiums. The insurance service result represents about 70% of the $3.2 billion operating profit.

As you can see, sources of profit are diverse across our reporting segments. Turning to the group operating result on the right of the slide, this was up 8%, reflecting a 10% increase in Eastspring's operating profit, combined with lower central costs. IFRS17 and restructuring costs were lower year-on-year and in line with the guidance I provided at the half year. In 2024, I expect these to remain at a similar level as we invest to enhance Eastspring's operating model and improve our back office efficiency and scalability, reverting then over time to the lower levels typically incurred historically.

More broadly, the key driver of our IFRS performance will be CSM growth, underpinned by growth in profitable new business as we execute our strategy. Finally, in respect of 2023 results, I've summarized the reconciliation of our group embedded value and IFRS17 adjusted equity on this slide, the main difference being economic assumptions with IFRS 17 calibrated on a risk-neutral basis and embedded value using real-world assumptions. On a per-share basis, closing embedded value equity was $16.43 per share or GBP 12.89, up 7%, and closing IFRS 17 adjusted equity per share was $13.56 or GBP 10.64, up 6%.

Given the combination of our excellent 2023 financial performance, continued sales growth over the first two months of 2024, and the relentless execution of our new strategy, we are increasingly confident in achieving our new business profit and operating free surplus generation objectives. As we've said before, our NBP growth rate objective is not a cap. We intend to grow the business to its full potential, driving compounding growth in value and capital generation.

Our 2023 gross OFSG performance is as expected. As a reminder, you should expect its near-term development to be moderated by investment in our capabilities, but to accelerate thereafter, driven by successive cohorts of high-quality new business. Out of the $1 billion investment in capabilities program, we invested over $100 million in 2023. The remainder will be weighted to 2024 and 2025. The 2023 dividend of $0.2047 per share, up 9%, is at the top end of our guidance range, demonstrating our confidence in future capital generation.

This confidence stems from our business model, the long-term growth opportunities in the Asian and African markets in which we operate, and our focus on execution. We are highly disciplined in the allocation of that capital, prioritizing investment in organic new business and building our capabilities. To summarize, our 2023 financial and operational performance was excellent.

Our capital position is strong and resilient. We have significant capacity to invest in future growth. We're relentless in the execution of our new strategy. Sales growth has continued into the first two months of the year, and we are increasingly confident in achieving our strategic and financial objectives, delivering growth, capital generation, building capability, and accelerating value creation for our shareholders.