Momentum Group Limited (MNTS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 17, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Dan Moyane
ExecutivesGood morning. And some other events when they announce it before you start, makes say, please, can we take your seats. People still run for their coffee and stuff. Today, as soon as the announcement went to say, please take your seats, everybody was seated. It's a good day, I guess. My name is Dan Moyane, just in case you forgot it. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to the presentation of the Momentum Group's annual financial results for the period ended 30 June 2025. We're going to give a special welcome to our analysts, to our investors, our shareholders, the media journalists as well who are with us. And of course, let's not forget our employees. We are all joining us live whether they are watching on mPass, which is our company's Internet on BDT Channel 412, that's on DSTV or you can be watching via our live webcast which is on corpcam.com. You have to follow that, and you'll find it there. By the way, the full results are also available on the group's website, which is momentumgroupltd.compared.za. Now over the past few weeks, we've been reminded of this group's rich heritage. And we celebrated the launch of the Metropolitan museum, which is, of course, showcasing a proud history that spends 127 years. And just last week, we also unveiled a large-scale solar energy projects at our campuses, both here in Centurion and in Bellville. These are initiatives that, of course, signal a bold step into the future and contributing positively to South Africa's energy landscape. But today, our focus is not on that. It's not in the past. It's on the present on the group's performance, its delivery on its plans and the impact that it continues to make. It is now my honor to invite the CEO of the Momentum Group Jeanette Marais, to present the results. Please join me in welcoming very warmly. Welcome, Jeanette.
Jeanette Cilliers
ExecutivesGood morning, everyone. Thank you for your time, and welcome to our head office in Centurion from where we are doing the live broadcast of our annual financial results for the year that ended June 2025. It really is an amazing day for all of us. I think we have so much reason to be so proud. But let's share it with you without any further ado. In the key takeouts of my presentation, I will briefly cover how we are progressing towards delivering on the F 2027 impact targets, and Risto will cover the details as we normally do. We delivered record normalized headline earnings of ZAR 6.26 billion for the financial year, up 41% on F '24, which was already a record year. These exceptional results were again due to all of our businesses doing really well. And except for Africa, each business outperformed the F '24 earnings targets and the F '24 delivery for last year. But because you've been following the turnaround times of Momentum Insure and Metropolitan, I will mention their progress for the very last time ever. Momentum Insure, I'm very happy birthday brunt, happy to celebrate that with you today, have successfully executed their turnaround strategy, and they've achieved sustainable profitability and contributed significantly with earnings of ZAR 458 million. And Metropolitan, welcome Peter, have delivered on the 5-point plan, which creates a solid foundation for them to focus on the delivery of their strategic objectives for the Impact strategy. Metropolitan contributed ZAR 868 million to our normalized headline earnings. We have also undertaken strong action to turn around our Africa business. We have completed the review of the operating model and the changes were implemented as of the 1st of July. Work remains, but I am positive that we have taken all the necessary steps to set this business up for success. In addition, a week ago, we finalized the transaction to sell our business in Ghana. Now these earnings were in spite of very tough economic conditions. And we foresee that these difficult conditions will prevail and that F '26 financial year will be a much tougher one, and we have to live up to that. Group VNB deteriorated by 20% from ZAR 589 million to ZAR 469 million. And this is, for me, the only disappointing part of our results that we're presenting today, and it will require an enhanced focus from all of us. Although the overall VNB declined, we saw good improvements in VNB from Momentum Retail, more particularly from Myriad and Investor from Metropolitan and also specifically from Africa. Momentum Investments, it's the biggest contributor to VNB in the group, and we remain the market leaders in the life annuity space. But because of the market demand shifting from guarantee to living annuities, this has had a significant impact on the decline in our VNB overall. In Momentum Corporate, the decline in VNB was caused by a shift in the mix of new business to lower-margin products. But Dumo keep on assuring me that our pipeline of higher-margin deals remain very strong. Overall, the group's new business margin declined from 0.7% to 0.6%, and this is still falling short of the targeted range of between 1% and 2% that we promised the market by F 2027. The management team has prioritized improving VNB and every business understands the importance of sharper execution and targeted interventions in this regard. And Risto will unpack our VNB in a lot more detail. Our sales remained broadly flat during the financial year, decreasing by 3% to ZAR 79.8 billion. But businesses that increased the sales volumes were Momentum Retail, up 3%. Momentum Investments, up 2% and Africa, who have increased their new business by a whopping 27%, well done Lulama and team. I'm also particularly proud of the wealth management business where our net flows more than doubled to ZAR 10.1 billion on the back of their focused collaboration with MDS and MSP. Now Momentum Corporate, which is the second largest sales engine after Momentum Investments, saw a decrease of 24% in sales volumes, and this is really due to a single large transaction of ZAR 3 billion that was included in our results of last year. And if you exclude this transaction, the group performance would actually have increased slightly in terms of our new business sales. We are then very pleased to declare a final dividend of ZAR 0.90 per ordinary share. This results in a full year dividend of ZAR 1.75 per share. And this also represents an increase of ZAR 0.40 -- on 40% on the prior year dividend of ZAR 1.25. Now Risto will share more detail, but the Board have approved a further ZAR 1 billion for the group's share buyback program. This is still subject to Prudential Authority approval. Despite the increase in our share price over the last year, the discount to EV remains at 15% to 20% because of the underlying growth in our embedded value. And while this discount remains, I believe that we can still see good value in the share buyback program. This for us just continue the momentum that we've seen in the value that we continuously return to our shareholders. Return on equity as an important metric for us, and we are happy with the consistent growth in our ROE. At this stage, at ROE of 21.2%, we are already above the F '27 target of 20%. Looking at our competitors for the full year, our ROE has been one of the highest in the industry, if not the highest. This reinforces the group's strong financial performance and our capital efficiency. Now I'm going to go over to my storytelling part that some of you will understand better and enjoy more. But often, risk though is what everyone look forward to. So in this section, I'm not going to give you a strategy update or share highlights on each of our business units like I did in the past because we recently had our Capital Markets Day, where we shared this in a lot of detail, and those presentations are still available on our website. Instead, I want to zoom in on two of our strategic objectives where I think we've made phenomenal progress. I'm starting with our objective to invade teams in our business that not only we think we do very well at, but one that we're also very proud of. So our focus -- sorry, I need to test whether the buttons are working. Our focus on advice remains a key component of our strategy and of our future growth, and specifically for us to be able to compete in the whole of the retail advice space. Through our distribution strength and our advice-led approach, we continue to differentiate ourselves in the market. We remain the undisputed market leader when it comes to independent financial adviser distribution, and we will leverage this position to continue to drive growth in our business. I'm going to take a pause, just look at this slide because it really is wonderful to be able to put up a slide like this. In the independent financial adviser, we have to realize that it is highly competitive, and it is highly demanding. And it takes a long time to turn around retail distribution. But we recognize this and we started implementing changes in MDS as early as 2018. We couldn't have been here if it weren't for specialization, and how our product and our channel areas have reinvented themselves over the last 7 years. We are now bearing the fruit of the tough decisions we made years ago. You can see the result of the strong partnerships between our product houses and MDS on the right, where every single product showed increase in sales from independent financial advisers over the last year. And I'm particularly pleased to point out the growth in the Momentum Health sales over the last year. Then on the left, you see the strong market share that we have been able to maintain in our investment businesses with increasing platform and annuities flows. And this, again, in spite of a fiercely competitive market. At the same time, we have seen increasing market share with good growth in Myriad, and we've been growing our market share despite competition that is heating up with several new players entering this market over time. Now we are often asked why we are so successful with IFAs. And Johann Le Roux and me and said, don't give away all our secrets. But I thought I'll share a few of you that really just stand out to me. And I want to say it because actually market dominance in the IFA market doesn't happen overnight. It is the outcome of years of hard work and our focus. And the first one really is our people and our relationships. Support for independent financial advisers is in our DNA for many, many years. This was the main way in which we've been distributing our products. We champion IFAs. We understand what they need, and we have great relationships with our support of IFAs. 3 years ago, we launched adviser partnerships which really offer support to advisers who choose not to join a network, equipping them with all the benefits that they would have had if they were to join a network. And then the quality of our distribution force. [ NMG that ] show how our life risk business consultants are consistently rated higher than anyone else in the industry, and our investment consultants are consistently rated in the top 3. We have competitive, highly rated products in the market and a very strong partnership between MDS and the product businesses. In Myriad, we did world first work over the last 2 years to simplify the underwriting process through technology, making the lives of IFA so much easier. And in fact, Myriad in terms of technology, ease of doing business and underwriting are rated consistently highly by advisers in the NMG survey, and then lastly, our strategic approach to this market. Specialization continues to distinguish us, and I believe that it enabled our business consultants to be the base in the industry. Consult by Momentum is a strong alternative to other networks, probably the second largest in the industry now and more of our tired advisers when they decide to go independent actually now join Consult. MDS continues to focus on growing their support base of IFAs from the current round about 2,500 to 3,000 by F 2027. And you might think this is a saturated market, but there are still many IFAs who are not supporting us. So the growth opportunity for MDS in this market remains very strong. And then lastly, the flexibility and the open architecture we offer in our product ranges enable advisers to custom make solutions to be able to put together the best outcomes for their clients. The second strategic objective that is really starting to show great results for clients and for the group is collaboration between our businesses. We leverage what is great about our Federated operating model, like end-to-end accountability, responsibility, in fact, we fiercely protect that. While we also unlock synergies and growth opportunities that exists because we are a group. Here, you see the types of collaboration that we have started to see manifesting in our businesses. And I can promise you we have great stories to tell about all 6 of them. But because of time, I'm going to focus on the first 3 and just share some amazing stories with you -- in terms of what we've been able to accomplish here. A great example of hunting together is the integrated employee benefits and health offering that we have created for Woolworths. And this is also a first for retailers in South Africa. So any retailer is listening, this is a great challenge for you. Woolworths came to us with a wonderful and audacious challenge to help them execute the vision that they had for their staff. They already had employee benefits for all of the 26,500 staff members, but only 5,500 of them had health cover. They challenged us to include health care for all of them adding an additional 21,000 employees, but to stick within their current budget. And this was really made possible by economies of scale that could only be harnessed through collaboration between Momentum Health, Momentum Corporate and Guardrisk and also the great partnership that we have built up with Woolworths through this process. But it's more than this. Each of these Woolworths employees have the option to include their family members as beneficiaries. So it's really about 26,500 families who now have access to private health care. We received the most wonderful feedback from employees, and I was privileged to attend the big launch that they had in Woolworths. And there were people that came to me that said, I could see an optometrist for the first time in my entire life and get losses. There's another woman who came to me with tears in her eyes and she said last week, I didn't have to take a day off work for which I wouldn't have been able to be paid to take my child to a doctor. How amazing is that? I'm almost crying again, like I always do, but you're used to that now. For me, it's all about what we could do here to bring dignity to people out there. Woolworths is the first to do this with us. And they benefit through a much stronger value proposition. We benefit from a deeply integrated client and a far more diversified income stream. And this opens up a whole new market section for us where we can co-create solutions with employers. And this really just live our motto in health, which is to provide more health for more people for lease. Across our businesses, we are now starting to also experience the power of joint product development. It's fantastic that I can talk about this product during natural Wools week. Our Meridian Momentum trust teams came together to jointly design the new Momentum estate plan, which is a new product that I believe every single person should have. It includes new features that are not currently available in the market, such as paying debt taxes on behalf of clients and providing immediate liquidity in estates. It also allows advisers to be more in control of the complexity of estate planning, and of course, to partner with Momentum in that sense, further cementing our relationship with our advisers. It is a new concept. It opens a whole new market for us, and it's a new way of us helping clients to protect their estates. This product opens up new opportunities for Momentum Investments to solve the need for investment estate and succession planning. And I believe that this is now the base product in the market and it was all made possible because of collaboration between our product teams. And then the last example here is how we successfully completed one of the largest again, possibly the largest legacy system migrations in the country. It was a collaborative effort between Momentum Retail, Metropolitan, Momentum Africa and several of our support teams from our risk teams that needed to help our finance teams, our auditors. And in fact, our auditors commented to me last week that this was the most impressive project management they've seen in a long time. We've migrated 2.4 million policies on to 3 different policy administration systems. And this project saves us more than ZAR 100 million per year across the 3 businesses with the lion's share of the savings going to Metropolitan. I'd say it was our biggest collaboration in the group for the last year -- the last few years because it has been on the cards for a long time. So other than saving us millions per year, it is also a building block towards minimizing risk in our business, further cost optimization opportunities, product rationalization definitely an improved client experience and this just future-proof our businesses for the future. So to end. The first year of our impact strategy was a great one. Our performance is strongly anchored by strategic clarity, disciplined execution, operational excellence and a robust financial position. We have repeatedly shown over the last few years that we can make the tough decisions when we need to turn things around. Now our focus is on VNB, continued sales growth embedding our Africa operating model and further improving and simplifying our client experiences across the business. We continue to make a significant positive impact on our clients through great products and service and our shareholders by delivering on our promises and to continue to create value for them and on the environment through various initiatives. And until Dan, you mentioned this, but I want to just tell a beautiful story about this because I'm so proud. And this is, for example, our 2 large-scale solar energy project at Centurion and Parc du Cap that has actually came online very recently. These installations will generate 7.5 gigawatt hours of electricity per year. Now when I heard the number, it means nothing to me. So let me put that into perspective for you. This is 30,000 street lights that will work for a year. We need to find them, but there's 30,000 of them. We will save about ZAR 13 million per year, but even better than that, we will reduce our carbon emissions by about 9,000 tonnes per year. And that is the equivalent of the emissions absorbed by 356,000 trees per year. Or if you like me and you fly every week, 24,000 flights between Johannesburg and Cape Town planum. Now I do worry about the planet every time I get in a plane, but I now feel better about it, because this is more than double the number of flights that we as an organization undertake per year. So I want to just say a special thank you to Gavin and the facilities team for making this happen. This was a phenomenal project. This is also the year of the implementation of the 2-part retirement system. And this was possibly the biggest change in our industry for many, many years. I am really proud of how our teams delivered on this change. Across Metropolitan, Momentum Corporate, Investo and Momentum Investments, all our businesses were ready to pay claims from day 1. Not a lot of companies can say this. And in fact, Metropolitan was the first -- they paid the first claim in the country with Momentum Corporate in a close second. The volumes had a massive impact on our service teams but we handled it, and we recovered our service levels to pre-2-pot levels at the moment. In this financial year, we received almost 350,000 valid claims to the value of more than ZAR 5.4 billion. We remain concerned about the impact that these withdrawals will have on people's retirement planning. On our book, about 19% of people who claimed with us are over 50 years of age. And this just again highlights the importance of financial advice. As I speak here, we are busy with the national adviser roadshow launching several new products in the retail market. This is the estate plan enhancements to Momentum Investments offshore list value proposition and improved share portfolio capabilities, to mention only a few, and this will further strengthen our competitive position in the retail market. We remain well positioned to deliver on our F 2027 ambitions. And in closing, thank you to all our employees for living our purpose to build and protect our clients' financial dreams and for shaping a culture that we can be so proud of. And to our financial advisers and clients, thank you for trusting us with your financial dreams. I will now hand over to Risto to take us through the rest of the financials. Thank you very much.
Risto Ketola
ExecutivesThanks, Jeanette. I enjoyed those stories. I suppose it shows what we can do as an organization when we put our minds to it, and also the impact we make to society at large. Before I start, I'm a bit more nervous than usual. Head office staff here decided to sneak my wife into the audience. So now I've got 2 bosses here. They do say that feedback is a gift, sir. So I'm sure I'm going to get a bit both from Jeanette and Lisa later on. Okay. Let's start with key financial measures. So obviously, very proud of the ZAR 6.3 billion of earnings, up 40% for the year. I think the first question I'm going to get from analysts is what do we think is the underlying earnings if you strip out some of the positive external factors? It's a very tricky question because even answering what is a normal underwriting margin? It's not as straightforward as you think, because do you look 5 years back, 10 years, 20 years. Also some of the work we've done recently is, like if you apply like a cost of capital lens to what the margin needs to be, it's not always the same as the historical industry margins. So -- the question is complex. Also on investment variances. I'll speak about it a lot just now. I think some of it is our own alpha rather than just external factors. So how do you adjust for that? Cutting through all those qualifiers, I would say that our underlying earnings is about ZAR 5.3 billion, ZAR 5.4 billion for the year. So it is still a good 20% growth even if we remove what I would attribute towards external factors. So I think we're doing very well as an organization. If we look at earnings per share, up 46%, so 5% more. We have accelerated our buyback program over the last 12 months. We basically doubled the volume of buybacks. So there starts to be quite a noticeable impact on per share versus absolute numbers. Then also in terms of dividend, Jeanette already said that we declared a ZAR 0.9 final dividend. We mentioned at the Capital Markets Day that we're looking at reviewing our dividend policy. I'm happy to say that we have now agreed with the Board that the new dividend policy is to target a 50% power ratio, not 40%. And the range is going to be 40% to 60% versus previous 33 to 50. This ZAR 0.9 dividend is towards the lower end of the new policy, but roughly in the middle of the old policy lead to a 40% change year-on-year, which I think is a good outcome for shareholders like myself. Then return on equity, 21%. Very happy with that. Obviously, the earnings are sort of at quite cyclical highs at the moment. I do believe the 20% target for '27 under more normal conditions is very doable at this stage. Other number, I'm very happy with it is the embedded value per share, up 15% for the year. Remember, we have paid quite good dividends in the last 12 months. So if I add the dividends back, the embedded -- the return on embedded value is 19%. That explains why Jeanette mentioned that despite the share price rally, the discount to EV is still there. Obviously, our operational performance was good for the year, but some of the EV growth is external markets. And I would maybe also put a shout out to like Guardrisk, the continued growth in Guardrisk is really supporting our noncovered embedded value growth. If I go back 6, 7 years, we always had very strong EV growth in the Life business, but less so on the nonlife. Now with our nonlife operations, Guardrisk insured asset management, all showing good growth, our sort of group ROEVs picking up quite nicely. I do think our underlying ROEV run rate has improved over the last few years. Sales volumes down 3% for the year. Jeanette mentioned that there were some large particular cases in corporate last year. I will talk about VNB later in a bit more detail, but the short answer is we had a 30% reduction in annuities, which is one of our highest margin products. You can't make up losing ZAR 100 million of VNB annuities from other products. It's almost mathematically impossible looking at the margin mix of where we shrunk versus where we grew. That said, the 0.6% new business margin is the most disappointing feature of these results. One of our Board members gave us a great quote at the Board meeting. He was saying disappointment is a synonym for enhanced focus. So we have enhanced focus on VNB going forward. I'd be very surprised that the 0.6% is not the bottom of the VNB margin cycle at the moment. I mean we still believe that 1% is doable by 2027. As per usual, I'll talk briefly through each of the businesses for about 1 minute. There's obviously a lot more detail in the analyst packs, but I will try to highlight, let's say, 2 or 3 key features for earnings in each business. Okay. So Momentum Retail. First of all, mortality experience was very positive. I was actually going to make a point of frontier, mortality variance, I think, was positive in every single business area. Mortality is now back to or better than pre-COVID levels. So we've seen a full recovery in mortality experience in South Africa. And obviously, it's in our favor with large risk books. We also had favorable assumption changes. We made quite a few assumption changes in Momentum Retail, one of them relating to how we model lapses. We used to have sort of less buckets in how we looked at lapses. We now have attributed the in-force book to a lot more different type of categories of premium increases and we applied different lapse rates in each of those buckets. The beauty of insurance accounting is it keeps people employed because it's complex. So in earnings, the changes were positive, but when I talk about CSM late, it was negative because the impact on onerous contracts was positive, but the impact on profitable contract was negative. It will make a bit more sense when I get to the CSM. And then finally, new business strain was lower. So as our margins have improved, we can effectively get more fixed cost coverage from future earnings on products like Myriad. We have also enhanced the efficiency of our distribution there, both on our side in terms of overheads. And if you recall, we have gone through some very difficult negotiations to change our sales rate expense agreements and that is not benefiting the VNB and the new business strain in Momentum Retail. Momentum Investments is where our biggest annuity book sits. There's about ZAR 40 billion of retail annuities and Momentum Investments. We have seen good CSM growth and subsequently, CSM releases coming out of that annuity book. What is important to keep in mind is that even though the annuity volumes have declined, the amount of CSM we're adding is still more than what we're releasing. So you could put in other words that despite the recent decline, the current level of profitability in annuities is still multiples what it was 5 or 10 or 15 years ago when we built up the current CSM. So the earnings growth outlook actually remains very favorable in annuities. You probably need annuities to either fall another 10%, 20% or another 3 to 5 years to actually get annuity earnings profile to be flattening out. Also later on, I'm going to talk about investment performance. But we don't passive list on these annuity assets. We are continuously looking for good quality credit assets. We are continuously looking for any market mispricing opportunities. I think the one thing in our favor is we got very little liquidity demands on us, which means that we can take quite sort of long-term views on market mispricings where we find them. We have an excellent, let's call it, alpha on the annuity book. And then lastly, most of you will know that we are busy with a major replatforming in wealth. The expenses incurred with that was significantly down this year compared to the prior year. Going on the Metropolitan Life, Pleased to see positive persistency variance here. The industry experience has been quite mixed, looking at the results. Now I have to say that we had negative persistency a couple of years back. So maybe we were forced to take action a bit earlier than some of the other market participants. But with the changes we have made to our sales force, our commission payment rules, our product rules, collection practices, we're now showing quite strong positive persistency variance, which is helping earnings substantially. There's also a smaller annuity book here. So -- and like most of the insurers, we do have 2 retail annuity books, one in Momentum, one in Metropolitan. So the positive trends I spoke about under investments is also coming through on the Met Life annuity book. And then finally, I think Dan said that Metropolitan has been around for 127 years. Some of the legacy products, there's often product management decisions you need to make in terms of how is the product meant to be managed 40 years ago, 50 years ago, what's the profit rules? What's -- and as part of the migration project, it forced us to actually accelerate and get to a decision on some of those product rules. And we have quite big data reserves in case we needed to sort of elect or decide on a more prudent treatment of those policies. I'm glad to say that we were able to release some of the data reserves as we now migrated this business onto the PDS system. So that's a bit of a one-off positive in there. Momentum Corporate. Dumo is not here today. I think it's actually pitching for new business. So -- so he's got his priorities in order. That's good. Now this business has gone from strength to strength in the last few years. We keep warning that this is a cyclical market. And obviously, margins being where they are, we still believe that they will probably shrink a little bit going forward. It's really the pace of shrinkage that we need to be guessing about. If I break the risk experience into the 3 main buckets, your life cover, the group life cover profits were very similar this year as last year. So high levels, both '24 and '25. The biggest change in terms of growth was the temporary disability book, what we call the PHI book. This is where people are temporary disabled, and we pay their monthly salaries. We have seen lower claims there, and we're also seeing more people go back to work. There is a lot of interesting debates always there things like work from home, does it make it easier for people to go back to work. So we're seeing good profits on the PHI book. And there's a knock-on impact is that often these disability claims are reported quite a few months after the testing becomes disabled. So there's quite a big lag sometimes. So the IBNR reserve here is actually quite an important factor of the result. And because of the lower level of claims, we've also been able to reduce our IBNR reserve. So the low claims are almost geared through both the current claims and the IBNR estimate. The only area where we had our claims experience going backwards is permanent disability. There we actually had a weaker result in the current year than last year. So those are people that are sort of -- have no chance of recovery in terms of going back to work. And there's annuity book here. And also, we did make some profits on the claims and payment reserve as well, which is a little bit harder to match the annuity book. Africa. Maybe the first thing to note in Africa is that the market variances here are negative compared to positive across all the South African businesses. The government bonds are an important asset class in most of these countries because of quite limited investment opportunities. And in Botswana, in particular, we saw the government bond curve go out quite a bit. Many of you will know that the Botswana economy is very dependent on diamond industry, and that's been under pressure, and we have seen the government bonds yield sell off in Botswana, leading the losses on our bond portfolios -- bond portfolio in that market. Looking at more operational factors. Namibia had a good year, less so in Botswana again and Lesotho. In terms of Botswana and Lesotho, what we have done is, as part of the new operating model, we have reassessed what costs should be paid out of country versus carried at the center. So we have allocated a bit more cost into the countries, which led to increased expense reserves in the current year, which hurt earnings. And then finally, at the South African support level for Africa, the operating model change has required quite a bit of additional work, including some consulting costs. So those sort of overheads were a bit higher than normal as well. Then moving to the nonlife operations. I'll start with Momentum Health. This business, your annual revenue growth is really a function of how much more can you try per member and how is your membership growing. And both of those are up about 4% for the year. So fee increases are normally pretty close to inflation, albeit in a tough economy, maybe you're fractionally below inflation. The 4% growth in membership, I think, is actually quite good. It's hard to definitely speak about the market. I mean there's only one listed peer really. But I think the 4% is better than average. Part of that is GEMS, the government employees medical scheme, and then obviously Health4Me, which is the low income product, which is quite central to the Woolworths story as well, showed very good growth in the last 12 months. We also offer capitation contracts to scheme. So this is where schemes want to effectively reinsure or ensure their medical claims experience. And we had a slightly better underwriting result on those contracts over the last 12 months. Moving on to Guardrisk. Another businesses had a good couple of years, 19% growth for the current year. A part of the strategy here has been to increase the level of underwriting activity. It's probably up to about 40% of profits are now coming from underwriting. Seeing the results from peers, you would have seen that in personal lines insurers, there's been spoken about the limited weather claims, lower claims inflation. The Guardrisk book is a little bit different, there's a lot more specialty business, a lot more commercial and corporate business, but there is some motor. There is some property. So some of those positive trends also play through into Guardrisk, so 18% growth in underwriting profits. Then in terms of the more traditional cell captive fee business, we've seen 8% growth in fee income. I personally think that is a good outcome. Part of Guardrisk business is that as clients grow to become very large, they have the option of setting up their own insurance license. So at the moment, we're seeing a large client move to their own license, which is putting some pressure on the fee income. So I think 8% net of that is a good outcome. And what is maybe less obvious from the outside, but it's very pleasing to me is the numerous bolt-on deals done in the last 5 years. They are all -- all of them I can think of in my head now, they're all delivering the business plan. So there's definitely been good shareholder returns on those various add-ons. Moving on to Momentum Insure. Excellent claims ratio. Again, looking at the competitive results, I think everybody has been favored by the weather and so on. At the same time, the 15% improvement in the claims ratio for the last year. Internally, we split half of it is external factors and about half internal factors. So in the insured business, we have had significant changes to our renewal strategy. And we're also always optimizing our pricing and underwriting activities for new business. So we believe half the improvement is of our own doing rather than just external factors. The only negative I can really say, well, 2 negatives. First of all, Rowan still owe me ZAR 5 million from the capital injection 2 years ago. So he paid as a dividend of ZAR 5.75 and we injected ZAR 5.80 2 years ago. Other one is that obviously, the greater focus on the underwriting margin has made it a bit more difficult to grow the gross written premium. So that is receiving quite a bit of attention. Moving on to India. Our India business is actually part of a listed entity in that market. If you've really done the hard yards, you might have seen that under India GAAP, this business showed a small profit. Under IFRS 17, the improvement is significant, but still a small loss. What that basically tells you that IFRS 17 accounting defers emergence of profits a little bit compared to the India GAAP. But the trend is the same. This business is not coming out of its day curve, which is most welcome, and it's actually having quite a big impact on the group earnings growth profile as well. This will be quite a big part of the growth -- earnings growth driver for the group for the next 2, 3 years. Also, top line growth remained strong. At the Capital Markets Day, I think we spoke about 30%-plus growth in top line for the next year or 2. It's early in the India financial year. But so far, the signs are good that there's no reason not to expect that 30% to be delivered. The shareholder segment is an interesting one. I still maintain for most analysts, you can expect a more positive in most years. In other words, the investment returns we get on the surplus capital at the center should exceed the my opinion, modest cost of the head office in most years. But in the last year, there's been 3 items that resulted in quite a big negative outcome for the shareholders segment. First of all, the performance optimization project include quite a bit of consulting and restructuring expenses. Those are up to about ZAR 100 million for the last year. Secondly, the VC market remains very challenging. So we have a second year of quite weak returns on our VC funds. We took a mark-to-market write-down of ZAR 231 million for the last 12 months. The total carry value of those funds on our books is now about ZAR 1.3 billion. Then also the way we do taxes at the group level is that we generally allocate quite close to a normal tax rate to business units and the overs and unders are carried at the group level, and we had a higher tax expense than normal in the last year. New business volumes, I'll talk about -- maybe I'll start with corporate. So the 24% decline in corporate is predominantly the driver of decline for the group. Beyond corporate, I'm actually happy with all the other numbers. Even the 6% in Metropolitan Life, we have cut down our sales force quite dramatically there the focus on quality of new business. So on average, we had 15% less agents for the last 12 months than the previous 12 months. Yet sales are down only 6%. So that's quite a substantial improvement in productivity per agent. Beyond that this morning, I was checking a few things, just getting ready. Annuity sales were down like something like 30% in Metropolitan, and annuities are sold through quite a narrow number of brokers. So if you look at the pure agents business, the recurring premium agency business, it was almost flat year-on-year despite all the reduction in the agent numbers. I'm just showing that we've been quite good at managing who has stayed and who hasn't stayed on in the agency force. Now -- I mean 1 week doesn't make a financial year. But I do know in June, we had a week now where productivity per agent was more than 4 policies a week, which is nearly double what it used to be a couple of years ago. So there's some really good green shoots and Metropolitan. I mentioned right in the beginning that I think VNB will improve from here. My view on Metropolitan Life is one of the key reasons why I'm confident about the VNB outlook. Then looking at other businesses, Momentum Retail, we saw sort of modest growth in both risk sales and in Investo savings products. Again, looking at the market, we might have gained market share despite low single-digit growth in sales. Momentum Investments, that's plus 2% is very different growth rates. So annuities are down 25% roughly. And then we had decent growth in our wealth business. Unfortunately, the margin on the annuities is probably, I don't know, 5x higher, 10x higher than in the wealth platform. So yes, you'll see the VNB drone, it looks a bit different. And then Momentum Africa, we saw good sales, particularly the suit to surprise me in the second half, some really good corporate sales towards the end of the year, which also aided the Africa VNB substantially. Moving on to margins. I'll just go one by one here. So Momentum Retail, we've seen a significant improvement here. 0.5% is not where we want to be, but I think the 1% to 2% we want to get to is a lot more visible now where we are. There's been a number of actions here ranging from repricing of products, changing some of the underwriting practices. Quite importantly, we are trying to make our distribution more effective, I mentioned it earlier already that we have looked at the distribution agreements we have, and we're also trying to reduce our overheads in terms of underwriting and so on. Momentum Investments, that change is purely mixed. I checked this morning that the marginal annuities on their own is almost flat year-on-year. So there's no deterioration at product level. It is a pure mix impact. Metropolitan Life, second half is positive. Peter, I hope we have 2 positives next year, and then we can see quite a bit of movement on this one. Also for the analysts, I just want to remind you, we use opening assumptions with VNB. So some of the positive assumption changes were made at year-end, they would have helped EV, but not VNB. So those will come into play next year when we produce VNB numbers. The Momentum Corporate. In the last year, a vast majority of large flows came into savings products and savings products with lower guarantees, in other words, ones with low fees. This year, right now, Dumo is out there hunting for a couple of larger deals at decent margins. The corporate margin is very hard to give guidance on because it is so dependent on 1 or 2 large deals. Again, it should not get worse because last year, we had very limited high-margin sales. Momentum Africa, I mentioned this to improve quite a bit last year. The restructuring we're doing in Africa at the moment, I think the benefits of those will be more visible from '27 onwards. So I wouldn't expect the same degree of improvement into next year. Okay. This slide, maybe for the last time. We get a lot of questions saying, your CSM growth is decent, but your VNB is low, like how does this tie up? Some of it is sort of obvious that our one number is pretax, one number is post tax. But the insightful takeaway here is we do have an unusual mix of very profitable business combined with a lot of very onerous business. Now looking at insurer results globally, almost everyone has some onerous business, but I do think we're quite unique just to the size of both the 2 buckets. The benefit of that is that addressing onerous contracts will actually move our VNB and our growth rates quite quickly. We made some progress in the last year. Just recently, we have relaunched some of our products to address onerousness of those contracts. So I think you'll see more movement on this in '26 than you did in '25. While we're on CSM, we showed 6% growth in the CSM for the last year. Once again, we had a positive change in estimates. It's something that I personally look at quite carefully. It tells me 2 things. It tells me that our assumptions are somewhat prudent, which is a financial person you always like. And it also tells me that we seem to know what we're doing in terms of managing our back book. So a lot of the focus on insurance is new business, but a lot of the real money is actually made on managing your back book and being efficient. And on that side, I think we do very well. If I remove the change in estimates, the growth rate in CSM is very close to inflation. I think at the current level of new business volumes and margin, longer term, we are looking at inflationary earnings growth, which is not something that we're targeting. If we can get our VNB to our internal target of ZAR 1 billion that 4% becomes, let's say, 7%, 8%, which is a very different picture in terms of a large diversified financial player in South Africa. This slide has got a lot of information, but I do want to talk through it a little bit. I'll start with those big red bars. That is the CSM and the risk adjustment for Myriad. I have said often that the biggest part of the group's future profitability is driven by Myriad, there's about ZAR 10 billion of future profits in that block of business, that actually shrunk year-on-year. And I mentioned in the beginning with assumption changes. The 2 negative changes that resulted in a decline in the CSM, First one is reinsurance. So despite the good reinsurance -- sorry, the smart good mortality experience lately, we actually faced increased reinsurance costs on Myriad. Now the way we have a right to reprice our book from time to time, the reinsurers have the same right to reprice our book from time to time. And unfortunately, we had to negotiate or agree to slightly more onerous reinsurance terms going forward. And then secondly, where we sort of had a gain on the onerous contracts on lapse assumptions, we increased the lapse assumptions on some of our biggest contracts with the highest escalations. So there was a substantial impact on your most profitable contracts in terms of lapse rates, which then hurt your CSM. That was a bit of a mouthful, but it was important because that's the only negative on the slide, everywhere else the CSM grew, I just wanted to be upfront about the reasons for the Myriad decline. Particularly noteworthy is the annuity growth. So Momentum Investments went from ZAR 4 billion to ZAR 4.7 billion, basically telling you 20% growth in future earnings and annuities, similar growth rate in Metropolitan Life annuities. Probably worth noting that besides the current volume of business being written, we also continue to see positive mortality variance on annuities. And that mortality variance actually gets absorbed in the CSM for future release. So the annuity earnings picture is looking very good. And then in Metropolitan Life, you'll see growth in both the savings and protection CSM reflecting the emergence of the 5-point plan in terms of the outlook of future earnings. So overall, very positive story again. Okay. I'll drop the very, it's a positive story again. Performance optimization. You're all aware that we're trying to take ZAR 1 billion of our cost base. Progress has been good so far. In December, we showed this slide for the first time. And by that time, we had banked ZAR 42 million of annualized savings. We're pleased to say that 6 months later, we had banked another ZAR 186 million of annualized savings. Our cost base is ZAR 14 billion. So I mean, these are big numbers. But in terms of percentages, they're not humongous, but I'm very proud of this project and the way it's managed and gone so far. The new bank savings variety of factors. We have 4 big ones here, contact center optimization, new OCR technology that's a bit more cost effective, better leveraging of local and offshore investment management teams looking at the retail branch infrastructure. There are no magic big-ticket items. The system migration Jeanette spoke about earlier at ZAR 100 million. That's probably the biggest single item, okay? It's actually the second biggest single item in our project plans. Also in terms of what are we working on at the moment, those savings that Jeanette spoke about that migration took place in May, June. So we're actually only switching off certain technologies and hardware and terminating some contracts now. So a lot of that benefit will come through in the current year. We're also looking at -- is actually -- I don't know, 1 deal a 100-odd projects or some on the go here. But we should be able to get quite a big jump by December '25 in terms of the bank savings. Also note the ZAR 54 million increase there on the top left. While we're doing -- while we're executing existing plans, we continuously invite business units to come up with new plans to make further savings. So that ZAR 54 million just reflects new ideas that have been populated into our project management systems over the last 6 months. Capital management. Okay. So cash generation has never been a problem for us. Again, over the last year, Momentum Group, the head office received dividends of ZAR 5.2 billion. Yes. The next time of business units ask me how much money does it send to make? I'm just going to say ZAR 5 billion. Okay. So we received dividends of ZAR 5.2 billion. That's about 80% conversion of NHE, that's quite a good dividend flow versus earnings. Our sort of reinvestment this year was actually quite modest. India, we injected ZAR 370 million. And the only material M&A deal we did was FinGlobal, which was just about ZAR 200 million for the year. So net of those investments, we had ZAR 4.5 billion available for distribution to shareholders, which is about 70% of earnings. And in the current year, the split will be roughly half in dividends and half in buybacks. So cash generation remains very robust. This ROE slide, I'm not going to talk through in detail. You are all familiar with it. I do want to make one point, which is Momentum Corporate, Metropolitan Life and Momentum Investments all have good ROEs despite a significant amount of annuity profits coming out of them. If you follow global insurers, particularly under Solvency II, there's been questions about the return on capital and writing annuities. I want to state that for us, annuities are one of the highest ROE products. The longevity risk in them is an excellent natural hedge to the mortality risk in our risk books. And then secondly, the credit risk diversifies very well with the insurance risks and most of the other market risk as well. So because annuities is a growing but small part of our business, the marginal capital requirement support is actually very modest. So annuities actually add to the group ROE rather than detract from it in our experience. Okay. Nice picture in terms of dividend growth. Maybe we should not declare ZAR 0.70 in second half '23. Otherwise, it will be a beautiful graph, good dividends to shareholders. We also completed the buyback program last week. So added another ZAR 237 million through the buybacks in the second half of the year. And as Jeanette mentioned earlier, we are going to start a new buyback program of ZAR 1 billion as soon as we have Prudential Authority approval. Now other topical matters. This is my favorite part of the presentation. The previous 30 slides is that I have to get through to get here. So -- so I always think of what can I do to improve people's understanding of our business. And the one area I thought I'll talk about today is investment variances. We get a lot of analysts saying it's hard to predict your earnings because the market variance are so high. So I'm going to talk about 3 areas of that today. I'm going to talk about impact of general equity markets, which upfront, I can say, is quite modest on our earnings. I'm going to talk about credit and the management of credit, which is very important for us. And then I'm going to talk about the bond markets, which are also important to us. In terms of current earnings, bond returns are more important than equity market earnings. That's also quite an important takeaway. Now, before I get to my favorite slide, let's get this -- get some easier slides. Despite what you read in the press, we had a massive market in South Africa in the last year. So local equities at 24% and local bonds at 18%. That is double to what you would expect in what we call a normal year. Now these are very favorable tailwinds to our economics. But remember that a lot of the savings business we recognize that fee income as it emerges. So the current year impact of higher markets is limited to the little increase in fees for the current year. Where you see more of it is an embedded value because now the fee expectations for the next 15 years have increased. So I think the running equity market is more of a factor for EV than it is for current earnings. Also on smoothed bonus business, very technical, but like I said, I did speak for 30 minutes to get there, so I want to take my time. So on smoothed bonus business, which is accounted for as a variable fee business, there the market run is basically booked into the CSM for future release. So through IFRS 17 treatment of smoothed bonus and the IFRS 9 treatment of savings business, a lot of the gains from equity markets is for future years, not for the current year. What is more important is the bond returns and cash, and I'm going to get to it on my next slide. Okay. Now when I look at this slide, I know what Michael Angelo felt when he looked at this is team -- okay. Maybe that's overkill, but. Okay. But now -- so -- what I have here is the 4 South African business units, and I spoke, I have split the market variance into what we call the economic assumption changes and investment variances. Economic assumption changes is basically the impact on earnings from using the closing bond curve versus the opening bond curve. Impacts are very small, and they're very small because we hedge the vast majority of our liabilities, okay? So very little of our earnings is this random popping out of yield curve movements. The vast majority of market variance is investment variance, which represents returns on the last year above our expectations, call that beating benchmark, call it alpha. And that accounts for, I don't know, a good ZAR 500 million. So the main reason our market variance are so high is not because of random [indiscernible], it's because we had excellent investment return on the assets we manage, backing our annuity books and our CSMs. So I'll start with the annuity book. So if you look at the grays bars, you'll see there's a ZAR 40 billion book in investments, another ZAR 10 billion in metropolitan. In Momentum Corporate, we manage the claims and payment reserve and disability a bit like annuity book. So we can add those 2 up. So in totality, there's about ZAR ZAR 80 billion of liabilities that are backed by a portfolio of risk-free and credit assets. Assume that the default rate is 50 basis points per year. I'm not saying it has it changes all the time depending on the S&P models and everything else, but to keep the math easy, 0.5% of ZAR 80 billion is ZAR 400 million. It's a lot of money. Every day, there's no default. There's another ZAR 1 million in bottom line, okay? Big part of the investment variance last year was almost 0 defaults for the year, okay? So the allowance we have in our own models for defaults. If our defaults are below that, we see an investment variance coming in our favor. In the last 9 years, I only had 1 year where defaults were close to default allowance. So I think there's a bit of a structural variance because of our tight credit management that we should expect on annuity book. The second part is that we know what the spread is today on the annuities versus risk-free. But being conservative actuaries, as these bonds mature, we assume reinvestment at lower rates. So the expected spread is actually declining as we model this book. So every time the BSM team finds us new assets to invest in, we actually replenish either risk-free or maturing instruments. In the last year, the team got ZAR 8 billion to ZAR 9 billion of new credit assets. I don't know, 200 basis points, time ZAR 8 billion, ZAR 160 million I mean -- so there's about ZAR 100 million gain from asset origination activities as well, okay? So I want to stress that the annuity book is managed reactively, as long as we know what we're doing, we should be able to generate some positive investment variance. I have never mentioned the trading activities. So there's also some trading activities. We don't wake up in the morning and say GDP print next week will be this. What the guys do look at a lot is mispricing of bonds that are close to each other in duration and things like that, and that makes some additional profit. So the first takeaway here is annuities are actively managed. And based on the last 9 years, I think we know what we're doing. Then the last thing I make here is the bond market. There is about ZAR 7 billion to ZAR 8 billion of CSM portfolio. So we have a liability of ZAR 7 billion, ZAR 8 billion. 3, 4 years ago, I told the guys in BSM. Nobody has been filed for stable earnings. So let's just hold money market against that liability, almost like guarantee an unwinded risk-free. They convinced me to rather invest in 3- to 4-year duration bonds. We're picking up ZAR 100 million of term premium every year for limited volatility on those bonds. Obviously, in the last year, even the short that it bonds rallied, so we had ZAR 100 million gain on those bonds. So when you do your modeling going forward, think about how much credit spreads we will make and have a look what's happening to the short end of the yield curve. That will tell you some idea of the mark-to-market variances on the CSM portfolios. Okay. I've done my system chapel now. Okay. And I can now close off. Okay. So obviously, excellent earnings in 2025, probably ZAR 1 billion more than we thought when we started the year. At the interims, we used to term we make our own luck. Now we have more time to think about it, so it's a bit more fancy now. We say we're well positioned to take advantage of favorable underwriting environment. We would not make hundreds of millions of positive variance in annuity. We didn't have ZAR 80 billion of annuities. We wouldn't make billions of underwriting profits if we didn't add tens of billions of risk business. So we have positioned ourselves to be in a good position to have these strong results when the market conditions make it possible. Cash generation never been a problem and continues to be a focus, but also an area of strength for us. Growth is an interesting one. It's very easy to go company lack of growth in South Africa. We need to look beyond that. Jeanette hasn't got that poster yet, but we don't do recessions. I think we'll get one. If the environment is tough, it just means we need to be other people for market share. I think we just need to focus on that. We need to find a better level of growth. Then finally, a bit like Jeanette, I want to congratulate our 15,000 employees. I'm going to -- now I'm already 3 minutes over time and I'll tell a short story here. When I was an analyst, I once went to a meeting with a very well-known CEO of a very large South African financial services company and one of the investors with me asked the CEO, how many people work here? And CEO said about half. He said, by the way, the problem is, I don't know which half in Momentum, I can think -- I think the answer is 90%. I think we have very hard work and dedicated people here. I think the attitude and the motivation is strong here. So I really need to thank the staff for the massive effort they made again in the last year. And like with Jeanette, obviously, there's no business with our clients and business partners like advisers. So a big thank you to you as well. Thank you. I'll now hand back over to Dan.
Dan Moyane
ExecutivesThank you. Thank you. Thank you, Risto. Thank you, Risto. As you just showed us, nervousness is always lighter when love is in the room. We are glad that your wife could join us here today. Yes, good day, ma'am.
Dan Moyane
ExecutivesOkay. Thank you very much, Jeanette, and Risto for the presentation, a set of exceptional results, but we've got some questions that we have received on our platform that we always make available for our analysts. First off, for you Jeanette, we got a question from Michael Christelis, of course, UBS. Can you comment on the sales headcount reductions and strategy for both Momentum Life and Metropolitan Life?
Jeanette Cilliers
ExecutivesI think this is a historical moment. I think it's the first time ever that Michael asked me a question. Normally, you asked those very tough ones to Risto. So let me see where I can do to answer. So firstly, I think headcount reductions in MSP or agency force completely by design. So this was a 2-year project for us because we knew that probably for the last 10 or so years, the foundation on which we were running MFP was simply not sustainable. Not in terms of our franchise model, as you know, we closed that down completely. I mean that had a massive impact on our business. And at the same time, the bonuses and the share or the sales related money -- bonuses that we were paying our agents for bringing us business actually just was not sustainable. So that caused a very big reduction in numbers. What is wonderful about it is that I could be wrong on the exact number, but I think more than 90%, 9-0 percent of those MFP agents actually, in the franchise model actually went and joined consult by momentum. So we haven't actually lost the headcount But what we managed to do is actually keep them in the business and move them on to consultant. That has actually helped consult quite a bit. The latest we've done, which, again, had quite a big impact was to start to look at validation to say that we actually cannot afford to have an adviser who is part of our sales force, but they live off the commission that they earn on the existing book. And that actually, in order to validate to be an agent in our agency force, to actually also need to write us a minimum level of new business. That caused a slight further reduction in our head count. But what I can say is that we are perfectly positioned with a well affordable, very profitable model that we can now apply to actually go out into the market and to start to recruit advisers for that model. In Peter's business, it was also by design. You might remember that I think 3, 4 years ago, just as we started with our Five-Point Plan, we had very large percentages of fraud that came out of that business. We needed to clean it out. And what we couldn't do was to simply get rid of the people who actually were part of the fraudulent transactions and not completely revised how we recruit, who we recruit, but more than anything, how we manage our sales force, and that has completely changed. So a complete clean out of the model. We're now very confident that the people we have in that model. And Risto mentioned the number that we're now up to 4 policies per week per those advisers. And what is wonderful is that I would say we got rid of the tail end in the business because actually our well tenured and longer tenured agents all stayed. So in spite of Peter and I'm going to guess a number here, about a 40% -- 35% to 40% reduction in our sales numbers. The resultant reduction in our new business flows was around about 15%, if I'm correct. I'm glad that is not in is set that those numbers are right. So actually, you can see that we held on to the quality people and that the clean out literally was more of a numbers one, but possibly the right one to now set us up for future success.
Dan Moyane
ExecutivesBefore you sit down, there's a lovely question here from [indiscernible] from 91. The integrated health and employee benefits offering done in partnership with Woolworths is an incredible benefit for employees. Congratulations on that. Does this include hospital benefits? Or is it mainly focused on primary care?
Jeanette Cilliers
ExecutivesSo yes, it is mainly actually Health4Me clients that we included for the 21,000 extra employees that was added. So in this case, it would be nonelective hospitalization. So let's say they get into an accident, that kind of hospitalization. And it really is just primary care at its school, yes. .
Estee Sevenster
ExecutivesYes, that's you for now. Thank you. We don't know if more is coming later. But from Michael Christelis, UBS, Risto, the next one is for you. In terms of the new protection volumes in Momentum Retail remain below pre-COVID levels. What is the core reason for this? And how do you tend it around?
Risto Ketola
ExecutivesYes. So we had a few slides showing that our market share has actually improved in the IFA side. And I think our overall market share is pretty flat for the last 5 years. So I think what we saw was a decline through COVID in the last few years, the market growth has been low single digits. So I think our experience has followed market trends by and large. Maybe the quite a big difference is that we have grown our IFA sales whereas agency sales and bank sales are probably a little bit down over those 5 years. Also, if you look historically, your risk sales are a function of things like like mortgage activity. People need life cover if they have a mortgage, small business activity, buy and sell plans between people. So I think the low economic growth means that the demand for life cover, but like demand for credit is a bit muted at this stage. So we would like it to be higher, but it's not like we are worried that we've fallen behind our competitors, and we need to do some in drastic I mean, Michael will also know that we're looking at doing underwriting easier ease of business using the facial recognition technology. So we're continuously trying to improve our market share. But if the market is growing at 1% or 2%, it's pretty hard to show exponential growth.
Estee Sevenster
ExecutivesThere's a question as well from [indiscernible] saying Risto, by what percentage did life annuity sales drop during the financial year across the group. And he's got a second one after that. So given the current economic environment in the country, where is Momentum seeing the biggest slowdown in its business?
Risto Ketola
ExecutivesYes. So life annuities across all our businesses is down probably close to 30%. What is quite important that annuity sales are not down 30%. It's basically been a switch from life annuities to living annuities. So as the markets have run like I showed 24% growth in the markets, all of a sudden the guaranteed monthly payment doesn't look like great compared to a running market. So we've seen annuity sales actually probably be up for the year but a big switch from guaranteed life annuities to living annuities, which are market gearing. In terms of areas, I mean, we -- the one area we've seen maybe the lease activity is a bit on the corporate side, but I don't think it's the economy. I think a lot of it has got to do with 2-pot and things like that, there's just been quite limited movement in the industry. I think a lot of pension fund trustees have had other things to focus on. So hopefully, the level of activity in the corporate market increases hopefully, we don't get any more terminations, but hopefully, we get more business coming in.
Estee Sevenster
ExecutivesOkay. Last question from Marius Strydom at Austin Lawrence Gidon. Can you please provide a list of some guidance on your Indian GWP growth target. I guess that's the gross retail premium target. Normalized claims ratio and either underwriting margin or operating margin target with the expected JV over the coming years, could this be the ZAR 1 billion earnings business by financial year 2030?
Risto Ketola
ExecutivesYes. So I'm a bit reluctant to give too much guidance because, like I said, this is -- this is an entity of a listed Indian company. So I don't know if they've given any guidance to the investors. So we obviously fully respect the confidential information. I mentioned earlier that in the short term, we're expecting more than 30% gross written premium growth. Already, the premiums in this business is more than ZAR 10 billion a year. Now growing at 30% obviously, about 2030, this is a big business. So you don't need much of a margin to have ZAR 1 billion. So simple mental math tells me that ZAR 1 billion profit, maybe not for us, but for the business as a whole, it's a feasible number for 2030. .
Dan Moyane
ExecutivesA couple of other questions, which I'm sure you deal with the analysts. But the last one before you sit to restore, what does the estimated core ZAR 5.4 billion underlying and excludes a question from really to a trough.
Risto Ketola
ExecutivesYes. So we can share it with you in the one-on-ones. It basically allows for a removal of the market variances. Although, like I said earlier, maybe we shouldn't remove all of it. Then it also allows for using a more modest claims ratio, both in Brunt business. I don't think I adjusted Guardrisk in that number. Also assuming lower risk profits in in corporate. But on the other side, I think I put 0 there for VC funds. Now obviously, if you assume a 10% return, then it's a bigger delta. So I think I use 0 is sort of minus 230 for the VC funds. And then lastly, our tax expense was a bit higher than normal for the year.
Estee Sevenster
ExecutivesA couple of other sort of more technical questions from analysts that you can take offline. But the final question for this session before we close is to you, Jeanette. It's a broader question about strategy for the group's revenue streams and it's from Baron Nkomo, JPMorgan, with banks, telcos and retailers increasingly active in the South and insurance market, either directly or through partnerships. How is management thinking about diversifying the group's revenue streams in South Africa to improve competitive advantage over the next 3 to 5 years, your thoughts?
Jeanette Cilliers
ExecutivesThank you, sir. I'll try and give you the shortest possible answer on this because I think it's something that we can engage on a lot more. And it's certainly something that my team and I are thinking about all the time. So if it started and it started by mentioning telcos and banks, if it is a bold question to ask whether we are planning to start a bank, I can again categorically say no. So that's not the way in which we think it's going to go. I think that increasingly, we need to find ways to also use the data that is available in the industry through various providers, including our own and to use that to extract more value for our own clients. So that's one thing. Then secondly, it is interesting that we have some competitive advantages that I think we can do a lot more with. There are certain still markets like the SMME market for corporate, that we're not yet the biggest player in. I still think there's massive upside for us in growing our footprint in the IFA space. We have the stated objective to aggressively growing our footprint in the agency force market, and there, we are punching way, way below our weight. So for us, it is actually sticking to the things that we know we are very, very good at. I can't see that we're going to start to do funny things that we haven't done before. We know what we're good at. We want to build on that. We want to put more capital behind that. We want to make sure that where there are 1 or 2 areas in our business that needs enhanced focus that we absolutely focus on it and that we fix that, and that we always look for great exportable capabilities that we have that we can use to actually enter markets like the Indian market that we firstly believe in, where we have a very strong partnership. And that secondly, we know that there are opportunities for us there to take something we do already well, take it into that market without actually needing a lot of capital, and by doing that, actually growing and strengthening the business that we have.
Estee Sevenster
ExecutivesThank you very much, I just give a round of applause as we conclude. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jeanette, for those responses, and thank you to you, Risto. Well, we'll come to the end of this presentation of the annual results of the Momentum Group for the year ended 30 June 2025. We wish to thank you all for participating, for attending our analysts, our shareholders, investors the media as well and our employees and colleagues. As you've seen the results that have been shared are exceptional. They really show strong delivery and real impact, and they deserve a big round of applause. I think we do deserve a big round of applause because, I mean, that's the stuff of legacy, Jeanette. This is the story of momentum today and hopefully for the future. So on behalf of the leadership team and everyone here at the group, we really appreciate your continued support. And thank you for having attended. It's been a privilege to host you. Enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you.
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