Swiss Re AG (SREN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Deutsche Bank Deposit Receipts Virtual Investor Conference, DBVIC. I'm pleased to announce that our next presentation will be from Swiss Re from Switzerland. Before I introduce our speaker, a few points to note. [Operator Instructions] Once the Q&A session has ended, don't log out. You look have to be transferred to the Swiss re booth, where you can continue to ask questions via chat and access shareholder materials. On a final note, all today's presentations will be recorded and can be accessed via the Deutsche Bank website, adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Marcel Fuchs, Director, Investor Relations, Senior Manager of Swiss Re, which trades on the Sixth Swiss Exchange under the symbol S-R-E-N and in the U.S. on the OTC as S-S-R-E-Y. Over to you, Marcel.

Thanks very much, and also a warm welcome from my side, and thanks for your interest in Swiss Re. So in the next 20 to 30 minutes, I'd like to focus on the following topics. So first, I'll start as a quick intro to Swiss Re and our group strategy. Then I'll give you an update on our 9-month performance. And I will conclude the presentation with our capital management priorities. There should also be time for questions at the end. So let me start with the summary slide on Swiss Re. So on the left-hand side, you can see that we are a truly global and diversified player, which is crucial to operate within this reinsurance industry. So last year, in 2021, we reported $43 billion of premiums. And you can see this is nicely split across regions and also lines of business. And having such a diversified and global book is actually rather unique and provides us clear competitive advantages. The reinsurance market is a growing industry. And you can see in the middle that we expect the market to continue to grow by 5% to 6% over the next years. And also, this is broadly in line with how Swiss Re actually grew the past 10 years. A strong capital position is very important for our clients. And you can see here, our solvency ratio as of midyear of 274% and also the S&P rating of AA-, both very strong. Obviously, also key for our equity story is the dividend policy. And here, we managed to grow our ordinary dividend by 6% over the past 10 years per annum. And on the right-hand side, you see the group financial targets. We introduced a new target earlier this year, the 14% ROE target in 2024, but we'll talk more about this then later in the presentation. The 10% economic net worth per share growth target is unchanged. Then let's move on to the Swiss Re Group strategy. So we have 3 business units: Corporate Solutions, Reinsurance and iptiQ, coming to all 3 years that we operate in the B2B world, so no direct interaction with the end customer. In the center, you can see, it's reinsurance. That's clearly our core business. So about 85% of the group premiums are generated by the P&C Reinsurance and the Life & Health Reinsurance segments. On the left-hand side, you see Corporate Solutions. This is our unit that provides us direct access to corporate clients, which is very important for the group. They generated about 12% of the group premiums last year. In course, we also had a restructuring in the years '19/'20. So we changed part of the management and completely our portfolio composition and strategy. Now, of course, is a specialized risk partner, and the focus is to generate attractive returns over the cycle. And then on the right-hand side, you can see iptiQ. This is our global B2B2C digital insurance platform, and it provides products to cover the entire insurance value chain, except for the distribution. Here, we work with partners, distribution partners like IKEA, but also other insurers, banks or intermediaries. It's an in-house start-up, and we expect this to be breakeven by 2025. And at the bottom, you see -- the foundation of all the business units are our people. Those are clearly the strongest asset, together with the capital strength I just mentioned, then the risk knowledge and also the access to clients. Those are actually key elements that have positioned us uniquely in this industry since more than 150 years. Moving on to the business update. And here, in 2022, I can -- it's probably fair to say that we have experienced a number of different crisis, which also affected, to some extent, the reinsurance industry and with that, also Swiss Re. Some of the crisis listed here, they're also connected like, for instance, the war in the Ukraine, the energy or the food crisis. Regarding the war in Ukraine, here, we set aside about $300 million of reserves at the beginning of the year, which is equivalent to about 1.5% of the premiums we earned in the first 9 months. So you can argue a moderate impact. Other topics like inflation or climate change are probably more relevant those days, for us specifically. And on the inflation piece here, it's important to remember, if you price a specific risk, this always depends on a number of assumptions about the ultimate claims we're going to pay. So we received the premiums upfront but the pay -- the claims, we actually pay only in 3 to 4 years' time. Therefore, inflation is an important factor in casting such risk transfer deals, especially in the property and casualty space. On the Life side, here, we pay out nominal amounts. So here, inflation does not play a big role. And if you talk about inflation, it's clear in this year 2022, we have seen higher inflation levels than we have seen in the past years and also than you have expected. So if you look at the U.S., Germany or the U.K., you have seen inflation rates of 8% to 10%. And as a result of the fact that they were higher than we initially assumed, we had to adjust our assumptions of those claims, which means we had to increase reserves. And we did so throughout the last 3, 4 quarters. On climate change, this affects our nat cat book, which I would say is the key business of Swiss Re. It represents about 25% of the P&C Reinsurance premiums, but much more in terms of how much capital do we allocate to this segment. We have a team of about 50 scientists in-house, which is looking about all the nat cat models, different perils like the hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, et cetera, across the globe. So in total, we have about 190 of those models. And nat cat is a business which comes with a high margin, but also a relatively high volatility. And this year, if Hurricane Ian, which happened at the end of September, we realized, okay, yes, it can result in also higher volatility in our results. So we booked about $1.3 billion for this specific event, which obviously impacted also our Q3 numbers. Important, nat cat business is usually a 1-year contract business. So after every year, we can actually decide whether we're going to renew this contract and also importantly, at what price. And the whole nat cat business goes through cycles. So in periods of a very benign nat cat loss experience, prices tend to decrease, and we call this a soft market, whereas if there's a lot of activity and if nat cat losses are higher than expected, then prices increase, and we talk about a hard market. And certainly, in the past, let's say, 4, 5 years, started already in '17 with the hurricanes in America, you have seen higher-than-expected nat cat losses. And with Hurricane Ian now this year, we can expect that the market is hardening quite a bit, but more on this later. Climate change certainly impacts certain perils like hail, flood, drought or the wildfires. We call them the secondary perils, but we see there are less scientific evidence on perils like hurricanes or earthquakes. And in 2022, we can say that next to Hurricane Ian, our results were also impacted by those secondary perils and, therefore, to some extent, also by climate change. This brings us actually to our results. So this is -- apologies, this is a slide with many numbers. You can see here our 9 months and also Q3 figures. I'd like to focus on the left-hand side to the group numbers. So for the first 9 months, we reported a loss of $300 million. This was mainly driven by the loss in the third quarter of $400 million. And the reasons for this is, first, the higher loss activity in the P&C Reinsurance segment and also the investment result. You see there at the bottom, the ROI for the first 9 months was 1.6%. Last year, it was about 3%, so almost double of it of this year's level. And the reason here is clearly the market turbulence we experienced also as a result of the war in the Ukraine. On the right-hand side, you see the results of the different business segments, but I go through those in detail in the next 2 slides. And actually, starting with both P&C businesses. So on the left-hand side, you see P&C Reinsurance. And here, you see the combined ratio over the past years. So for the first 9 months, you see a combined ratio reported of 106%. That means combined ratios, the claims and the internal/external expenses were higher than the premiums we earned. So this is looking only at the underwriting result, and it's not reflecting, for instance, the investment side. And the very being mainly 2 reasons for the higher combined ratio. I touched on those already in the previous slide. First, the higher-than-expected nat cat losses we have experienced this year especially also Hurricane Ian, but also I mentioned some of the secondary perils and then also inflation was impacting our results. Here, we had to change the assumption on our existing reserves, but we also experienced higher and small to midsized claims more generally. Important on the P&C Reinsurance segment is also the outlook. I mentioned before the pricing cycles. And here, the market expects quite a hardening of the market. That means higher price increases for next year, especially in the nat cat segment, but not only. And this is driven by some supply demand dynamics. On the supply side, we see less capacity in the market. So some players, they're reducing their capacity. And there's also no support from the alternative capital space to be expected. And on the demand side, this remains high, also actually driven by inflation. Because inflation basically also increases the insured values. And with that, the need for the primary players to place their covers. So in short, it's a difficult year 2022, but the outlook for next year is certainly promising. Some analysts even saying they expect to see the highest pricing levels seen in the last 30 years. Then on the right-hand side, you see the Corporate Solutions segment. Here, the high combined ratios in the years '19, '20, they are related to the restructuring I mentioned before. So when they basically changed the whole portfolio and reposition themselves, this resulted in some one-off actions. And you can see that in the years '21 and '22, Corporate Solutions is actually performing very well. For instance, for the first 9 months this year, they show a combined ratio of 93%. So they are very well on track to achieve their full year target of less than 95%. If I move on to Life & Health Re. Here, you can see that this performance of this unit was impacted by COVID-19 pandemic in the past 2.5 years. This is not a surprise. Pandemic is something we model and price for actually and expect to happen every 30 years. So basically, a pandemic in Life & Health, that's all fine. Obviously, when it happens in those 2 years, it results in quite some big numbers. Here over the past 2.5 years, we reported about $3.5 billion of COVID-19 losses, and 80% of this is related to the U.S., where we also have a market-leading share. But here also a bit on the outlook. I think Joe Biden also mentioned that the pandemic is over. And you can see, if you look at the claims or the COVID-19 mortality claims in the second and third quarter of this year, that the numbers are coming down and that we see a normalization there. Generally, the outlook on Life & Health Re is very positive. So for instance, this year, excluding the pandemic, we would have expected a net income of about $800 million. Next year, we expect this to increase to about $900 million to $1 billion, and we expect an additional earnings uplift under IFRS 17 in 2024. So now we covered the business performance of the 3 segments. I also mentioned inflation. Obviously, with inflation, we also experienced higher interest rates. And it's also always important to keep in mind that we reinvest about $5 billion to $7 billion of dollar per quarter. And if you have higher interest rates in the range of 150 to 200 basis points, this means a significant uplift to the recurring income. So the chart, what it shows is the orange line is the reinvestment yield. And here, you can see in Q3, it's 4.1%, which moved nicely in the last, let's say, 2 quarters. And also the recurring income yield or some call it, running yield, you can see that it's moving up since the second quarter. In Q3, we, for instance, mentioned that we had an additional $100 million of recurring income versus last year, just because of the higher reinvestment yields. If you analyze this number, it's already $400 million. So you can see that the benefit from higher interest rates is expected to be higher over the next, let's say, 2, 3 years, then the negative impact of higher inflation on the claims side. I already touched a bit on the new ROE target of 14% in 2024. Here, you see the walk how to get there. The starting point was actually the 5.7% reported ROE in 2021. And now we can see the moving parts. And the biggest one is actually what I mentioned is the normalization of COVID-19, particularly also on the Life & Health side, adding already 5 points to the ROE. Then second is the Life & Health in-force earnings under GAAP. We expect them to increase from next year onwards as the so-called historical drag from the pre-2004 U.S. book will decrease. This will add another point, and then you have the earn-through of the P&C price increases of about 1 point. And here, this depends a bit also how pricing develops next year. This might be even a conservative estimate. And then lastly, we focus on selective growth, while maintaining also cost discipline. Important, this ROE work was based on shareholders' equity at the year-end. And [ Davio ] even mentioned that the equity in 2024 is expected to be higher than at the end of '21. And important also, this is the arrow on the right-hand side, which indicates once we report under IFRS 17, which is actually in 2024, this will be more a presentation of the economic perspective. And there, we expect actually that the Life & Health Re earnings power is higher under IFRS than it is under GAAP. So there's an additional boost, and that's why we indicated or implied that the IFRS ROE will be higher than the 14%. And this slide shows our -- on the left-hand side, strong capital position. So you can see here the group solvency test ratio of 274% as of midyear. This is above the midpoint of 200% to 250%. So very strong, also supported by the higher interest rates. And then on the right-hand side, you see the capital management priorities that they remain unchanged for quite some time. So there, the first one is that be secure and superior capitalization at all times. The second is that at least to maintain, if not grow, our ordinary dividends. And the third one is deploy capital for business growth. This is especially attractive in an environment like this. I mentioned hard market to be expected next year. And the last one is then additional capital return to shareholders, for instance, via share buybacks. So probably to conclude this presentation, it's fair to say that the 9 months of 2022 performance was heavily impacted by higher losses on the P&C Re segment, but important, the other 2 segments, Life & Health Re and Corporate Solutions, they are well on track to reach their targets for this year. And also, we remain confident in our outlook. I mentioned the rising interest rates and also the expectation of the price increases for the upcoming renewals and also then on top of this, the transition to IFRS in 2024. So with that, I conclude my presentation and would move on to the Q&A.

So there's one question. Do you see the drivers for your Q3 loss to continue into Q4 '22 and also 2023?

I think we mentioned already that the reasons for the loss in the third quarter was primarily driven also by the Hurricane Ian with $1.3 billion. Obviously, we do not expect such a loss to happen in every quarter. We have a budget for -- or we have an expectation for such nat cat losses in a given year. This is -- was about $2 billion. So you can see having an event like Hurricane Ian with $1.3 billion, this is fairly significant and something, yes, we do not expect to recur every quarter. Obviously, if you say next year here, yes, as I mentioned, we have a budget for such nat cat losses. But yes, I also mentioned that we remain fairly confident on the outlook, also given what you expect pricing and the upcoming renewal to be fairly strong.

Another question is that -- so do you see Corporate Solutions as a growth area? And what are your expectations for growth?

Yes. So there was a lot of pruning in the years '19, '20 in this segment when they basically exited certain lines completely, like, for instance, the U.S. liability or others; other lines where they were subscale; and they're refocused on lines where they see a competitive advantage and something to bring on the table. And since then, actually, let's say, since the pruning was completed, you can also see that the growth rates there depends also with this year. We had a negative impact from FX rates, given the report in dollar, but it was already double digit. And we -- you can expect this basically to continue. Important for Corporate Solutions. The focus is also to generate attractive returns through the cycle. So for the commercial segment, we are, I would say, in a hardening market. So the pricing is fairly strong. Generating attractive returns in this market is what you would expect players to do. The challenge is also to generate positive returns in a soft market, so once pricing will turn and decrease. And so what they prepare now heavily is that they basically can invest in other business, which is -- have a different cycle correlation and therefore, providing also attractive returns in a soft market environment.

Another question is what do you see as the greatest risk to your business or capital position?

So probably, if you say what's the greatest risk here? It's fair to say we disclosed, I think, twice a year our sensitivities to also our capital position. And there, you can see, for instance, that if there's a 1 in 200-year event, so very, very extreme events which happened, as I said, every 200 years. If such an event would happen, for instance, such a earthquake in California or such a hurricane with this devastating impact, this would certainly be quite an impact. So you said 1 in 200 years event for a nat cat, let's say, in the North Atlantic could result in a loss of about USD 6 billion to USD 7 billion, which is obviously quite meaningful. So there, we list all those potential sensitivities. And it's a bit related to the nat cat book and also to the pandemic. So I mentioned the hurricane in the North Atlantic, also the earthquake in the U.S. or also pandemic on the Life side.

There's another question coming in. How do you plan and decide your climate investments?

Not sure I fully understand the question, but if you talk about, let's say, on the investment side here, we have -- we follow clearly the ESG benchmarks. So all the investments follow the ESG benchmarks. And then basically make sure that you are also in line with those frameworks. Specific climate investments, I'm not aware of. So probably, we would take this question off-line. So I see no further questions. So many thanks for your interest in Swiss Re. And in case of any follow-up questions, please reach out to the Investor Relations team. You see the contact details at the end of this presentation. So happy to connect off-line. So many thanks for your interest, and have a nice day.