Gjensidige Forsikring ASA (GJF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Gjensidige's Fourth Quarter 2024 Pre-Close Call. My name is Mitra Negård, and I am Head of Investor Relations. With me, I have Apineya Maheswaran from our IR team.

Hi, everyone. This is Apineya. Please note that this call is being recorded, and the recording will be published on our Investor Relations website after the call. We will start with going through the Q4 reminder, which was published on our website yesterday. This reminder highlights relevant public information. Afterwards, we will open for a Q&A session. As always, we only answer questions related to already disclosed and public information. And please note that if you want to ask questions, you need to log on via the Teams app. So let us start with 2 key dates. We will be releasing our Q4 results on the 24th of January. Our silent period starts on the 1st of January. As always, we kindly ask you to forward your estimates using template we sent you yesterday. Please fill in all the open cells in the sheet. The deadline for sending us your estimates is the 13th of January. We will publish consensus on our website on the 20th of January, and I will hand you back to Mitra now.

Thank you, Apineya. Now, let's move on to the reminder. As usual, we will start with comments on the weather. For the sake of good order, we always remind you of the seasonality in our business with the winter quarters, Q1 and Q4, normally having higher claims ratios than the summer quarters, Q2 and Q3. We had a mild winter in Norway earlier this quarter with higher average temperatures than normal in October and November. December has been more normal in terms of temperatures. The South and Southeastern regions were dry earlier in the quarter, while the regions in the middle and north of Norway were very wet. We have had a winter storm Jakob during the quarter, primarily impacting the Western Coast of Norway. Days with slippery roads in Norway, the past weeks due to snow creating more challenging driving conditions than earlier in the quarter. In a reminder on our website, we've added links to a few examples of press releases and media coverage and the driving conditions. And as always, for statistics on weather, please refer to the links in the section General Information at the very end of the remainder. As always, bear in mind the results for the comparable period last year. As communicated in connection with the presentation of our results in January this year, the reason for the year-on-year increase in underlying frequency loss ratio for private Norway in Q4 2023 was threefold, around 30% for weather, 40% strengthening of reserves and the remaining 30% due to a combination of elevated claims frequency for motor and volatility in medium-sized claims for property, mainly fires. The next reminder is regarding the sale of ADB Gjensidige, our operations in the Baltics, which we announced in July. As communicated earlier, starting from the third quarter this year and until completion of the transaction, which is expected at the latest in the beginning of 2026, the results for ADB Gjensidige will be presented separately in the group accounts as profit loss from discontinued operations. Please see Note 9 in the Q3 2024 report for further details. Bearing in mind the acquisitions we made in Denmark in 2023 in terms of effect of insurance revenue. You'll find the details in the reminder and the year-on-year impact on insurance revenue in our Q3 2024 report. Over to large losses, this is also the same information we have conveyed in the past 3 quarters with a general expectation for normalized large losses, of NOK 476 million per quarter in 2024. In terms of excess reserves, there was no change in our communication. We continue to set reserves according to our best estimates. And bearing history in mind, we expect runoff gains and losses also in the future. On inflation, we will, as per routine, provide an update at our earnings call. Please see a reminder for references to the relevant slides in the Q3 2024 quarterly presentation and report. Moving to our new Tier 2 bond issued on the 29th of October, the NOK 900 million issue was settled with a coupon of 3 months NIBOR plus 145 basis points. We're very pleased with having received an approval from the Norwegian FSA for our windstorm risk modeling in the partial internal model. This was, as you know, announced on the 15th of November. The approval reduces our capital requirement with approximately NOK 1.3 billion based on the capital requirement as at the 30th of September. Our approved partial internal model as of the 30th of September '24 would have been 185%, assuming this reduction in SCR and around NOK 250 million of the Tier 2 loan issued on the 29th of October. The eligible amount of the loan will increase over time as the capital requirement increases with growth in our business. Moving on to solvency and our investment portfolio, our reminder includes general explanations you have seen for quite some time. We've also added some general comments on how the premium provisions impact the eligible own funds. Regarding the subtraction of dividend from own funds, remember that in the fourth quarter, we replaced the formulaic 80% with a proposed dividend for the year, which is, as always, announced together with the Q4 earnings release. For the investment results, as always, we believe a good starting point for estimating returns is using the same asset allocation as the previous quarter, applying returns on the indices we have listed in the reminder. We have a new index for the match portfolio line, fixed income, other currencies, reflecting that the match portfolio no longer includes assets matching liabilities for the Baltic operations. Also, we have removed the benchmark index for the line other, and it didn't quite reflect the returns adequately with the line, including both finance-related expenses and returns on hedge funds and commodities. You will find the full list of benchmarks in the reminder. There, you will also, as you have seen a few quarters, see a top-down approach, which is useful to combine with the bottom-up calculations. Bear in mind the separation of figures for ADB Gjensidige as commented a moment ago. And finally, on unwinding and changing financial assumptions, remember the rules of thumb and the example calculation which we have published on our website. We've also included relevant swap rates for the different currencies in our reminder. Bear in mind the separation of figures for ADB Gjensidige on this topic as well. So with that, we will now open up for questions. Please raise your hand, and we will open your lines. All right. There doesn't seem to be any questions here. All right. Thank you all very much for your attention. We wish you all a very happy holidays and look forward to take on 2025 together with you. Have a nice afternoon.