Beazley plc (BEZ.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Beazley's Q1 trading statement. Barbara and I will cover the key points of the quarter's performance, and then we will move to Q&A. At our year-end presentation, our central expectation for 2025 was that market conditions would soften, and this has indeed been the case with rates down around 4% in the first quarter. This is within the estimates we had when we arrived at our guidance. As we've mentioned at previous calls in Q1s in prior years, GWP is quite volatile in the first quarter. And in particular, adjustments to prior year premium estimates have an oversized impact at this time of year. A lot of our partnership business renews in the first quarter, and so that's when we make adjustments to prior year performances. In addition, we often see nuances between some of the divisions in the first quarter, which will even out over the rest of the year. And this is the case in 2025. So our guidance for full year growth of mid-single digits remains. Going through the divisions. Within cyber, premiums are currently around 2% down year-on-year. However, we do consider this team to have material scope for upside. As I mentioned a couple of seconds ago, Q1 was impacted by prior year premium estimations. But stripping out that, growth was better than we've achieved for a couple of years. And indeed, for the group overall, stripping out premium -- prior year premium estimates, our growth for the year was actually mid-single digits year-on-year. Back into cyber. Whilst business in Europe is competitive, we continue to maintain good rate adequacy, and this is where we continue to focus most of our investment. I'm pleased though with the progress that our team has made in the U.S., and we're beginning to see signs that, that market is stabilizing in response to increased criminal activity about which we have been commenting over the last few quarters. We believe the market is brittle, as we described at the year-end and can move quickly. The biggest renewal date for the cyber market is June 30, July 1, and we will have a better idea of the prospects for the cyber for the rest of the year as we head into the summer. Within property, the Q1 growth is also influenced by prior year adjustments. And the market, as we described at year-end, has so far absorbed the Californian wildfires without much reaction. But despite the competitive environment, rates remain attractive and there are good prospects for continued growth. Increased flow into the E&S market in the U.S. persists. And although prices have come down a little, reinsurance terms and conditions are most important -- most importantly, reinsurance attachment points have not slackened, and we think this will help maintain discipline. We continue to actively manage aggregate deployment across the insurance and reinsurance teams and between the teams in London and the U.S., to ensure that we have the best risk/reward possible and the optimized portfolio that we seek. Moving on to MAP. Also impacted by prior year estimates to a reasonable degree, and the flat premium to date isn't reflective of the underlying performance. The market remains buoyant across this product set, and we do expect MAP to be a good growth driver for the group in the full year. It is too early yet to see the impact of increased global tariffs on the marine, aviation and transport portions of the book. But given the continued heightened geopolitical tensions, those divisions of MAP that write that business should enjoy -- should continue to enjoy strong demand through the rest of the year. Within Specialty, we've had modest growth again this year. Now having enjoyed a strong Q4 in 2024 as markets and capital markets, in particular, began to rebound, macro events this year have subdued capital activity once again, and this is reflected in the premium numbers. We remain cautious across the U.S. liability segments, which has suppressed growth in that division for a while now but continue to invest in the products not exposed to social inflation in the U.S. So we expect growth in the full year to be a little higher, but this team will not be a growth driver for the group as a whole in the short term. And with that divisional review, I will pass to Barbara, who will cover the most interesting bits around IFIE and investment performance.

Thank you very much, Adrian. And as stated during our year-end result presentation, we appreciate that the estimation of our insurance finance income or expenses P&L line item, also known as the IFIE, is challenging to model. As we've mentioned before, we will be disclosing this as part of our quarterly trading statement going forward. Hence, for the first quarter of 2025, the IFIE is an expense of $68 million. The change in other financial assumptions is in -- in this line item and income. However, this is offset by the unwind of the discounting credit as well as a further expense due to the changes in yield curves in this quarter. During the first quarter of the year, interest rates have reduced across all maturities, leading to a decrease, as mentioned in the discounting credit. With regards to our investments, the performance as at the end of March is delivering a very positive result of $136 million or equal to a return of 1.2%. Trade policy announcements began during the first quarter, elevating uncertainty and leading to increased volatility and declines in equities and to a lesser extent, it impacted corporate bond trading. It's likely that the financial market volatility will remain with us for some time. However, as you know, our investment portfolio is well diversified and allocated prudently with almost 90% of the portfolio being in fixed income. We have a conservative appetite on the surplus portfolio, which leaves us relatively well positioned in current market environments. The average yield of our fixed income investments at the end of March is 4.4%, which supports a good outlook for investment returns for 2025. I'll pass back to Adrian to conclude our summary of the release.

Thank you, Barbara. So an update on outlook for the year then. We indicated at the year-end presentation nearly 2 months ago that we expected two things really; one, our central case is that the market will get a bit more competitive this year, given the strong results in -- across the specialty insurance industry over the last couple of years and the fact that most insurers are now looking to grow. But secondly, that the market is brittle. There is quite a lot going on under the surface, and there have been a number of shocks over the last few years. So we wouldn't be surprised if there were more unexpected events and conditions could change very quickly. While nothing has happened since then really to change that view, on the one hand, there have indeed been a number of shocks, which could have very meaningful impacts on world trade and indeed the way the world is organized. But on the other hand, that has not yet had an effect on the insurance industry, and the downstream impacts from what has occurred so far are mostly secondary and very absorbable. So we do expect increased replacement costs and economic inflation. However, we can price for this as most of our products are rated off asset values, but there may be a one-off impact from business already on the books. This should be relatively minor. We don't write much personal lines business or auto business, which will bear the brunt of this transition. And a slowdown in GDP growth, particularly in the U.S., our biggest market, could subdue the margin demand, particularly on products like D&O and M&A, which are correlated to capital market activity. And therefore, we are adjusting our inflation assumptions in our pricing, in our reserving, in our capital models, but it's all pretty modest so far. And therefore, the market remains competitive, but within the parameters of what we had discussed and thought through when we gave our guidance for the year at the year-end presentation. The claims market remains elevated and complex and the market is brittle. So our central expectations have not changed, mid-single-digit growth in the light of softening rates of between 0% and 5% and therefore, guidance of an undiscounted combined ratio of mid-80s. And with that, we will open up to Q&A. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

I have two questions. One on property. So within the press release, you've called out rates as being adequate. But just wanted to get a sense from you as to how much headroom do you see within the pricing before you start getting a bit less comfortable in that segment? And then the second question, just on combined ratios. I was wondering -- I mean we have also been hearing the reinsurance prices coming off, so I was just wondering if you're willing to leverage that to sort of grow the top line, but yet manage your risk.

Great. Thank you very much indeed for those questions. Yes, we do believe that rates remain adequate overall for our property division. I think it's not an even playing field, though. As we look across the reinsurance portfolio, the high-value homeowners portfolio, the large risk business that we're writing, the syndicated shared and laid business, the mid-market business, the SME business, London versus the U.S., there are differences in risk/reward there. And so we are being very active in managing our aggregates and our exposure growth across those to make sure that we optimize, but we remain comfortable. If the property market continues to deteriorate, we will continue to look at that. And if we do think rates are no longer adequate, we will signal as such. But I think the portfolio management that we exercise is going to become increasingly important. As you mentioned, the reinsurance market prices -- prices have been coming down in the reinsurance market a little. I flagged in my narrative earlier on that it's a price issue rather than a terms and conditions and attachment point issue. And I think that's very important. Prices don't have the same impact on the underlying behavior of the insurance market as terms and conditions do. The fact that most insurers retain a lot more risk than they used to is very important. And so I don't believe that there are the opportunities to arbitrage reinsurance to enable us to grow the top line more in the way that they used to be, but that is a good thing. Primary insurance market discipline is very important to us as it gives better long-term opportunity and means that we can price our business properly.

And our next question is from Kamran Hossain from JPMorgan.

Just a follow-up on Vash's question on property. I guess it sounds like the outlook is maybe slightly worse than you had expected and maybe we'd expected given kind of noise we've had in the market over the last week or so. In terms of kind of levers that you have to pull, you're much -- a big business but a much smaller business than maybe the larger reinsurers, et cetera, what levers do you think you have to pull if you do want to keep up a little bit of growth for Beazley that are probably inherently different for Beazley versus some bigger players, where you're more nimble, where you can grow, et cetera. What do you think those are? What could you do more of? The second question is -- coming back to the claims experience or the kind of market comments you made on cyber and talking about kind of claims experience maybe getting a little bit worse for the market. I think historically, you've typically said that your claims experience has been better than market. Just interested in kind of any kind of comments or additional color on that.

Super. Thanks, Kam. So our property business is mostly insurance rather than reinsurance. And I think that does give us more optionality. I think it's very useful for us to have platforms both here in London and in the U.S. and access to business both small to very large, and that does give us the ability to move our portfolio around quite quickly. And I think our access, particularly to retail business in the U.S., is quite strong. We are relatively small compared to some of the bigger players, but that does mean that we can operate very coherently and cohesively as a single unit. And so we can react quite quickly. And so for example, our high-value homeowners business is growing more quickly than our syndicated large risk business, which we're taking some risk off. And we can do that instantaneously as we want to. And that is helpful. We continue to invest outside North America. So we're building our property business in Europe, for example, where we think there's good long-term opportunity. And taking a step back, the reason we've invested in our property business over the last few years is because we do think that the conditions that -- and the exposures that asset owners face are more complex and will continue to be more complex over the long term because we're living in a changing world from a physical perspective as well as a social perspective. So irrespective of short-term movements in pricing and the pricing cycle, we're quite excited about this opportunity. But it's important that we continue to react and underwrite and portfolio manage in the same way we do across the rest of the divisions. On the cyber side, we've been flagging for a while now that there is more criminal activity, more cyber crime since the kind of brief pause in 2022. And we continue to hear of more stresses across the market and an increased strain on profit margins. And we do see some signs of that cyber market changing. Nothing has happened within our own portfolio to cause us to adjust our own guidance in any way. But as you know, we keep a very close ear to the ground across our intelligence network in terms of what's going on and what we need to react to. And I think the claims environment continues to get more complex. And it wouldn't be surprising if the market reacted to that, but we remain comfortable with our own pricing levels and our own performance.

And risk selection, yes.

And risk selection.

And we will now take our next question from Will Hardcastle from UBS.

I have worked this out by now. Can you discuss how the weakening U.S. dollar should impact the group from a top line and margin perspective at all? I guess, helping any split of revenues, cost base, U.S. dollar, GBP, et cetera, might be useful, recognizing there's a fair amount of variable costs in there as well as the fixed. And the second one is you talked there about cyber and things do look like from a headline, they're reducing at a faster pace. I guess is there any aspect of that a mix or geographic nature in that comment and whether you'd be willing to separate North America and Europe rate in that discussion point?

Thank you, Will. So I'll answer the cyber one quickly, and then I'll pass to our FX expert to my right. So yes, there is a difference. The international market is more competitive than the North American market. And so that is driving the rate reduction numbers that you referred to. Having said that, frequency of loss outside North America remains lower than in North America. And so we are comfortable to continue to grow exposures internationally and continue our investment as such. Having said that, we are also very aware of changing geopolitics and the impact that can have on where cyber criminals may choose to apply their trade. And so our underwriting of business across the world is adapting to those changing exposures that we foresee. And that may begin to have an impact on the mix of business internationally as we continue to underwrite through the year. But if we were to split out the rate change between our international portfolio and our U.S. portfolio, they would be quite distinct, yes. Do you want to have a talk about FX?

Yes, I'd be happy to. So as a starting point, obviously, when looking at the movement we've seen in the dollar year-to-date, if you compare that, it's approximately a dollar weakening by 10%, and that would have less than 1% reduction of the 2024 profits after tax and less than a 1% increase in equity. Bear in mind that we report in dollars and a substantial part of our business is in North America. So again, everything that relates to the claims costs and the rates and everything else in the U.S. is obviously not impacted. But as we have a bigger part of our expenses coming back to cost of staff and so forth in pounds, obviously, that will have the impact, as I mentioned, on the profits as a proxy.

And going back a step, Will, when we looked at our combined ratio guidance preparing for today, thinking about FX movements as well as macro impacts of the last few months on all our financials, our combined ratio guidance of mid-80s is still valid. So all that has occurred is still within the tolerances of what we contemplated when we put our full year guidance together a couple of months ago.

We will now move to our next question from Darius Satkauskas from RBW (sic) [ KBW ].

Two, please. The first one is just going back to cyber. Is the cyber business in North America approaching price inadequacy or not for Beazley? And what about the wider market in your view? And the second question is, do you have any comments in terms of the power cut in Spain and Portugal? Is that an insurance loss? And what could be the sort of the angles here?

Great stuff. Thanks very much indeed. So is pricing in North America for cyber approaching rate adequacy? We're comfortable with where prices are at the moment in North America. I do think the range of performance across the insurance market for cyber in North America is quite right -- is quite wide. I think it's very distinctive depending upon your risk selection criteria, whether you're primary or access; what industries you're, long or short, in and whether it's SME, mid-market or large. So I do think that the performance this year and last year will vary quite a lot. But given our own real focus on controls and risk management and the industry mix that we have, we are comfortable with where our portfolio is and how it's priced. As we mentioned at the year-end, [indiscernible], we think that the profitability overall in the market is getting squeezed and that we wouldn't be surprised if that provokes some sort of reaction later this year. But I think performance will vary quite widely between different carriers and MGAs and so on and so forth. On the power cut side, undoubtedly, there will be some insurance loss from this. I think it is too early to figure out how much and what sort of loss. As we've all been reading about over the last 18 or so hours, we still don't know the cause of it. I mean, I think the good news is that power is back on for the most part and those countries impacted begin to recover. But we're all very interested to find out what exactly happened and why and therefore, what the impacts are. But it's too early to say yet because we don't have much detail.

And can I just follow up with one question, please?

Yes.

Are you able to comment on sort of loss activity in the quarter outside of California wildfire losses? Was it a benign quarter for you?

Thanks, Darius. Had there been anything that occurred that would have impacted our guidance, we would have done. So I think the absence of any comment, Darius, is probably the signal that we're trying to send.

And our next question is from Abid Hussain from Panmure.

I've got three questions, two of them are just sort of quick ones. The first one on the premium growth. I think you may have mentioned it, but I didn't quite catch it. Are you able to say what the underlying premium growth was looking through the premium restatements, premium adjustments? I think you said that it was mid-single digit in line with the guidance. If you can just confirm that, please, and sort of what the mechanics are of it sort of the headline growth moving back to the guidance of mid-single digits? That's the first question. And the second one is on the pricing outlook. I'm just wondering if you're seeing any impact at the industry level on rates coming up to the midyear renewals following the California wildfire losses, if they are sort of starting to feed into any negotiations for midyear renewals. I know it's a little bit early, but just any color on that would be helpful. And then just coming back on cyber. Thanks for sort of discussing the Spain and Portugal outage, it's probably too early, as you say. But just wondering if there's any comments on the M&S cyber attack, if there's any exposure there or these sort of hours clause kicks in there, too?

Great stuff. Thank you for those questions. So yes, I can confirm that the underlying growth for this year is indeed mid-single digit. So you were correct in your assumptions there. I think the shape of that growth is relatively similar to the shape of the growth that we show, including the prior year adjustments. There's a bit of nuance between division, but not a huge amount. On the pricing for the midyear renewals, I assume you're talking about the property catastrophe reinsurance pricing, which we'll make a comment on. Again, it's not a big part of our property portfolio and therefore, not a big part of the whole portfolio as a whole. But I think what we are expecting is that whilst the reinsurance market remained competitive for the catastrophe renewals at 4/1, the vast bulk of those renewals were for companies that had very little exposure or had much to do with California at all in Japan, for example, and therefore, fairly unimpacted by that. As we think about those who will be buying reinsurance between now and the 1st of July, a lot of those were impacted by last year's catastrophe activity and indeed, the wildfires in January. So I do think the outlook for those renewals is distinct from what happened at 4/1. And certainly, from what we're seeing so far, reinsurers appear to be adopting a slightly different strategy for that. So I think we're hopeful that the reinsurance market will be a little stronger, but we will wait and see, and we'll react accordingly. With regards to the M&S attack, we don't comment about whether or not we underwrite certain companies. But were we too, that will be a single loss to us and therefore, relatively immaterial once we net off for reinsurance. So -- but yes, there would be an hours clause on that, I would imagine, if M&S buy a standard cyber product. But given how long that attack has gone, I would imagine that deductible would have been eroded by now. But I don't know. And even if I did, I couldn't comment.

And our next question is from Sandy Kang from Bank of America.

I just have one question, and it's just on reserve adequacy. So at the end of 2024, you guys strengthened the risk adjustment on your MAP lines just ahead of the uncertainty. I'm just curious how that's looking now that we've had 4 to 5 months of 2025. Do you think any further strengthening on MAP would be needed as the experience has unfolded?

Yes. Sandy, good question. But as you know, this is a light quarter. So we usually don't comment on reserving in this particular quarter, but we'll revert to that at the half year.

Have there been anything material enough to make us change our guidance, Sandy, we would have said something and we haven't.

And our next question is from Rhea Shah from Deutsche Bank.

Just two questions. The first one is a clarification. Am I right in thinking that you said that you expect rates to be down 0% to 5% for the year? And if so, how should we be thinking about that across the various lines of business? And then the second question, in terms of the IFIE, it's very useful to have the breakdown in the statement today, is there anything you could say about guidance for the rest of the year?

Thank you for those questions. Yes, so you were correct. We -- within our guidance, we were expecting rates to go down between roughly 0% to 5%, which is sort of where we are. There will be some up and downs between the divisions. You can see that there are some there. It's not a huge variation. And if anything, we expect that to narrow through the year, but we will wait and see.

And on the IFIE, I'm glad to hear that it's helpful with the update on the quarter, but unfortunately, we don't guide on that for the remaining year. Remember that the 2 of the 3 pillars relates to movements in interest rates. So that's obviously one that we cannot give any guidance on. But in general, we will give these quarterly updates, so you know how it progresses over the course of the year.

We will now take our next question from Chris Hartwell from Autonomous.

Just a couple of questions from me. First of all, I just wanted to go back to the geopolitical backdrop. And I was just wondering what areas you may be sort of more focused on in terms of secondary impact. One of the comments you made earlier on the MAP side, I think if I heard correctly, you think there's going to be potentially stronger opportunity in that line through the rest of the year. But I guess I was wondering about if there's sort of negative more sort of activity-based impacts such as Global Marine and stuff like that, that could offset or could weigh on the growth outlook there? And then secondly, on the investment side, obviously, Beazley is very short duration and very dollar exposed. And so I was wondering if there's anything you can say in terms of the investment strategy and sort of defending yield as we go through the remainder of the year.

Thank you very much indeed. So yes, I think I called out both those impacts when it comes to geopolitics. So whilst we haven't seen it yet, if world trade is impacted by increased tariffs, that will reduce demand for the kind of marine aviation and transport part of the business. We haven't really seen that yet, but we certainly could do. Having said that, as you yourself said, there are other parts of the map book where we are writing political risk and political violence and war and so on and so forth, where we expect demand to be quite strong. And so those two sort of do offset each other a bit. But it's a little early to see what the real impacts of those will be, but we'll adjust our underwriting accordingly. Barbara, do you want to talk about...

Investments? Yes, happy to do so. And Chris, as you can see in the results, we already saw a number or a bit of volatility in the first quarter, but our investment portfolio delivered a strong result. The approach we have on the investments is that the majority of this, almost 90% is matching the liabilities on the balance sheet. Hence, that has, you can say, the specific purpose. And on the surplus portfolio, it's a distribution across assets where we have a relatively conservative approach. So the intent is that even in volatile markets, we should be in a fairly good and stable position. So we are quite, you can say, protected in that context.

Thank you. It appears there are currently no further questions at this time. And I'd like to hand the call back over to Adrian for closing remarks.

Great stuff. Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you for making the time for us this morning. Thank you very much indeed for your questions. And we look forward to seeing some of you later. And have a good day. Thanks so much, indeed.