Swiss Re AG ($SREN)
Earnings Call Transcript · May 7, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
OperatorGood morning or good afternoon. Welcome to Swiss Re's Q1 2026 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Andreas Berger, Group CEO. Please go ahead.
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesThank you very much, and good morning or good afternoon to all of you. I appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Before our Group CFO, Anders Malmstrom, walks you through the details of our first quarter results, as usual, I would like to start with some brief remarks. We've made a strong start to 2026, delivering a net income of USD 1.5 billion in the first quarter. This represents 1/3 of our full year net income target of USD 4.5 billion and positions us well for the remainder of the year. The annualized ROE for the quarter amounted to 24%. All business units contributed to this result, also helped by a good investment contribution. Both P&C businesses delivered strong underwriting results, supported by a low level of large losses in the quarter and excellent underlying profitability. This allowed us to post a strong overall result while also strengthening the balance sheet. Turning to the market environment and P&C reinsurance renewals. The April renewals confirmed the continuation of the trends observed in January. Our focus on prioritizing portfolio quality over volume remain unchanged. This is what is required by cycle management. Competition has intensified, especially in nonproportional nat cat. Here, the nominal price is down high single digits for our overall nat cat portfolio through the year-to-date renewals. Casualty and specialty lines show a more balanced overall price development picture. Within casualty, liability experienced notable rate increases, though we remain cautious with motor also seeing rate improvements. Overall, we have achieved a nominal price increase in the mid-single-digit range for our casualty portfolio year-to-date. Within specialty, competition has picked up. However, nominal rates rose across the majority of sublines. As a result, the nominal price is slightly up for our overall specialty portfolio. Through the January and April renewals, we have successfully defended our market position and relevance and importantly, remained underwriting -- maintained underwriting discipline and terms and conditions. That's key for us. Our client franchise continues to be in an excellent position. Specifically in the April renewals, we saw stable demand in panels in Japan. In the U.S., nationwide clients increased demand and we participated. In certain markets, an influx of new capacity led to materially lower adequacy, and we decided to reduce exposures. India agriculture is an example where such actions can have a disproportionate impact on volumes. Some new aggregate covers were placed. Here, we maintain our cautious stance. What does that mean in terms of the overall renewal outcome? The April renewals represent a relatively modest portion of our overall business at 12%. Combined with the January renewals, overall nominal prices -- pricing has been flat despite the noted pressures in property nat cat. When taking into account prudent increases in loss assumptions, the net price change stands at a negative 4.4%. Overall volume is down slightly at minus 2%, primarily driven by the nominal property rate declines and by the stated reduction in agriculture business. Overall, the portfolio quality and outcome of the renewals remain supportive of our 2026 financial targets. This also means that our renewals at renewals have progressed broadly as we expected when we set the targets at the end of last year and communicated it also to you. We expected a more challenging 2026, and this is clearly what is happening. This is simply the nature of our industry, and therefore, you will continue to see us applying discipline and cycle management. Subject to loss event development, we expect similar trends into June and July. This means higher demand but continued pricing pressure. Accordingly, at this point, you should not expect us to write higher volumes. We will remain focused on defending the overall price adequacy and quality of our portfolio. Now turning to Life & Health Re. The first quarter has provided encouraging signs that the actions taken in 2025 are delivering the intended outcome. The business is now on a very strong footing, let's say, on a stronger footing as evidenced by clean earnings delivery in the quarter, supported by a positive experience variance for the first time, by the way, since our IFRS transition. This supports our confidence in achieving the USD 1.5 billion and USD 1.7 billion net income target for 2026. Let me also touch on new business generation across the group. The main driver of the year-on-year decline is the impact of the January renewals in P&C Re. In addition, the contribution from Life & Health Re in the first quarter was more muted, which reflects the inherent variability of underlying transaction activity throughout the year. By contrast, new business CSM in Corporate Solutions remained broadly stable year-on-year, which is a very solid outcome in the current environment. CorSo benefited from more favorable reinsurance conditions in the external market as well as the inclusion of the P&C Re's credit and surety business. This partially offset the risk-adjusted rate decrease that we saw in Q1 and which amounted to around minus 5% for our overall portfolio. While CSA is clearly also having to manage downward price pressure, in particular in property, we continue to see underlying growth in our strategic assets that we call them and focus areas, including international insurance programs and alternative risk transfer solutions. Looking ahead, our goals remain delivering on our financial targets and the group's overall resilience. Against the backdrop of geopolitical turbulence and an increasingly challenging market environment, our P&C businesses will remain focused on disciplined underwriting. In this context, we expect Life & Health Reinsurance to make a growing contribution going forward. At the same time, we remain focused on cost efficiency. Now with that, I'll hand over to Anders for a closer look at the financial details of our financial first quarter results. Anders, over to you.
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesThank you, Andreas, and good morning or good afternoon to everyone on the call. Andreas has taken you through the highlights of our overall positive first quarter. Let me add a few further details before we move to the Q&A. P&C Reinsurance reported an insurance service result of almost USD 800 million, well above the prior year level. The increase was mainly attributable to favorable experience variance, which captures deviations from initial reserving assumptions. In the quarter, we saw positive experience variance related to both current and past services. Just as a reminder, under IFRS, this broadly corresponds to what we previously referred to as current year and prior year development. The positive experience related to current services was around USD 100 million, primarily reflecting large nat cat losses coming in USD 276 million below expectations partially offset by reserve additions of slightly more than USD 100 million in IBNR form to cover potential late attritional losses. Andreas mentioned that we strengthened the resilience of the balance sheet. In the quarter, we achieved a positive experience of around USD 130 million related to past services. This includes around USD 450 million of positive reserve developments. In light of geopolitical uncertainties associated with the ongoing Middle East conflict, we decided to retain most of these benefits and established around USD 400 million of IBNR reserves to address potential inflationary impact, of which USD 350 million in P&C Re. On the back of these elements, P&C Re reported a strong combined ratio of 79.5% in the first quarter, comfortably within its target of below than 85% for the year. Let me also briefly touch on new business CSM before moving to Corporate Solutions. New business CSM amounted to USD 1 billion compared with $1.4 billion in the prior year period. As we indicated with our full year results in February, we expected the January renewals to translate into a roughly 3 percentage point increase in the nominal combined ratio compared to the up for renewal portfolio. The year-on-year reduction in new business CSM of around USD 350 million is largely consistent with that expectation. Turning to Corporate Solutions. The business unit delivered a strong combined ratio of 85.1%. The related insurance service result was $286 million, supported by a CSM release of $192 million, broadly in line with last year. Experience variance and other was positive at $146 million, primarily driven by a favorable experience related to past services across all lines of business. In addition, Corporate Solutions benefited from lower-than-expected large nat cat and man-made losses, largely offset by the usual IBNR allowance for potential claims seasonality due to late reporting. New business CSM remained broadly stable, supported by resilient new business generation and the inclusion of about USD 40 million from P&C Re's credit and surety business, partly offset by a more challenging property pricing environment. As a reminder, net new business CSM is subject to seasonality with the majority of the reinsurance program incepting in the first quarter, while assumed business is written more evenly throughout the year. Turning to Life & Health Re, where we see the impact of the actions taken in 2025 coming through. The net income of USD 491 million reflects underwriting margins from the large in-force book, favorable experience and a solid investment contribution. The insurance service result increased to $547 million and includes a CSM release of $379 million, corresponding to an annualized release rate of around 9%, in line with our full year guidance. The result was also supported by a positive experience variance of USD 60 million, primarily from the U.S. mortality portfolio. A few words on the top line. Group insurance revenue is down $371 million versus last year, primarily due to P&C Re, where the overall renewals outcome and reduced cedent volume updates represent the main drivers of P&C Re's 8.5% decline. On a net basis, P&C Re's revenues are down by a more modest 5.7% as we lowered our external retrocession in nat cat. Further, iptiQ revenues contained in group items have reduced by $192 million due to our withdrawal progress on that business. Life & Health Re revenues are up by $240 million, mainly due to FX tailwinds, while Corporate Solutions revenues are down $77 million. Excluding the impact of the discontinued Irish Medex business, CorSo's revenues are up by around $100 million, which includes an FX tailwind. We also benefited from strong investment results with an ROI of 4.6%, supported by disposal gains of USD 159 million, primarily from real estate sales, while recurring income remained healthy at USD 1 billion. Lastly, on capital, we continue to maintain a strong capital position with the group SST ratio estimated at 252% as of 1st of April, above our target range. With that, I will leave it here and hand over to Thomas to open the Q&A.
Thomas Bohun
ExecutivesThank you, Anders. Thank you, Andreas, and hello to all of you from my side as well. As usual, we have the first question, please?
Operator
OperatorThe first question comes from Kamran Hossain from JPMorgan.
Kamran Hossain
AnalystsI've got one topic with a couple of questions. Really kind of intrigued about kind of your attitude towards that building prudence at Swiss Re. I know we talked about this at the IR Day and not wanting to push too hard. But what was behind the decision to post such a strong Q1 combined ratio kind of discount in your favor, like, you've done some stuff anyway. But could you have done more given you're probably a little bit earlier on your kind of reserve build journey than some peers. So kind of to do that more. The second question is just on reserve releases in the quarter. In the commentary, you mentioned -- I think it's USD 450 million of reserve releases in the quarter that you offset with the kind of inflation-related Middle East sorry, the inflation as a result of the Middle East-related charge. The USD 450 million, was that substantially higher than you had expected? Because for me, that does sound very high for a quarter. I just wanted to understand whether this is just positive development or something else happening in the background that means this could be a higher number going forward?
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesYes. Maybe we come and these 2 questions in a way are the same question. They hang very much together overall. So maybe just to step back, when we talk about reserving, when we talk about prudent approaches, I think we were very clear that we're always going to reserve at the higher end of the best estimate range. And that's the philosophy, how we reserve, how we set also loss picks, and you also see that now in the renewals. The loss picks that we said are prudent. They reflect the basically exactly to be at the upper end of the best estimate range. So that should then also in a normal quarter, this should then also come through to the reserve releases. And that's exactly what you now saw in Q1. The USD 450 million is a solid number. We don't really give hard guidance, but we show evidence, and we see that every quarter how this reserve is now developing. And that's on purpose. That's absolutely on purpose. Now to your point about then also more technical questions like discounting and other things. These are more consequences of that. So the discounting is not higher per se this quarter. It's only higher because of the additional reserve that we put up for the Middle East because you basically allocate it to all the different lines, including liabilities. We just put it everywhere. And then because you have a long-term liability business, that's where the discounting is higher. So it's a consequence of the reserving. It's not the reason for the good result. So I think overall, we're very happy with that. It actually shows that the whole framework is now working and is coming through. So it's a good outcome.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Will Hardcastle from UBS.
William Hardcastle
AnalystsJust thinking about the P&C renew business CSM, clearly, that was materially low. And you said it aligned with your expectations when setting those full year targets in December. And then you link that with about 3 points of combined ratio deterioration. I guess the question is if the June and July renewals, if we see this continued trend, and let's say that pushes us beyond the 3 percentage points combined ratio guidance, is that then starting to say it's a bit worse than we anticipated for '26 and beyond? Because of course, a lot of this -- I guess the other part of that is how much of that USD 1 billion new business CSM flows into the current year earnings versus what goes into future, thinking about extrapolation of that. The second one, I just wanted to quickly come back to Cameron's question there on the USD 450 million of experience variance. It's a really large number. Is there any, I guess, one-offs within there? I mean I presume you're not trying to make a that's a run rate from here. I guess any color of sort of abnormality within that USD 450 million would be very helpful.
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesOkay. So let me start on the new business CSM. I think -- look, I think we -- as you rightly state, I mean, the 3 percentage point combined ratio impact is exactly in line with what we see now on the new business CSM -- and look, our view is that we -- everything else equal, we will probably see a continuation of what we have seen at 1/1 and 1/4. So we have no indication one way or the other. But the other point I want to make here, I mean, this really reflects also a very prudent loss pick that we put in. So the 4.4% that you see here, I would say, I mean, that goes back to the discussion we had before. That's a very prudent assumption. That's obviously reflected in the new business CSM. So we don't try to manage new business CSM. We let it go through. And then once we see the reserve development, you should then see it come through in the form of reserve releases, which leads me directly to your second question, the USD 450 million, there is no one-off in it. This is just the reserve development. But it also allowed us now to say, okay, I think we see the uncertainty in the world. We see the Middle East conflict that creates volatility. Let's take a prudent approach and put some of that money to the site for inflation that we will see somehow. You will see an inflation impact coming from the higher energy prices coming from the disruption on the supply chain. We don't know exactly how much. We don't know for how long this is going to last, but this allowed us now to take that approach as well to then continue that prudent approach.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Shanti Kang from Bank of America.
Shanti Kang
AnalystsI was just reading the U.S. primary results over the last few weeks, and I noticed a number of the primaries are increasing their limits and being able to negotiate more favorable terms on their reinsurance programs. And then this morning on one of the London market names, we heard for the first time that there's been a bit of modest slippage in Ts and Cs. So I was just curious to get your take on that. And if there is any slippage, where is that focused? Is that on attachment points? Is that on wordings? Or you mentioned a bit earlier the return of ag covers in specifics. But any color on that would be really helpful.
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesYes. Let me take maybe that question. I think we have been very clear. So terms and conditions, structures remain stable. We have also heard of maybe individual cases where aggregates suddenly were a topic again. But I think we will apply discipline, and that's what I said also in my initial remarks, we stay very cautious here. We don't see a reason why this should be supported. We also have heard also from primaries, certain individuals who are referring to rates shooting down in certain markets, in particular, E&S. And here, I can assure you, we're observing the whole situation. We're reinsuring some of it. That's why we're very attentive here. And I can assure you on the CorSo side, it's a very, very limited activity and exposure that we have there mainly or almost exclusively in property with a very low volume of around USD 200 million to USD 250 million revenues coming from that area. So we're observing it, obviously, as a leading reinsurance market, but we're very cautious.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Andrew Baker from Goldman Sachs.
Andrew Baker
AnalystsFirst one, just on the P&C Reinsurance revenue. So you mentioned the sort of renewals were broadly in line with what you're expecting coming into the year. It sounds like -- or it looks like the results today is lower than what it sounded like you were expecting at the December management dialogue event last year. So can you just help me understand sort of where that delta is. So what the decline was versus what it sounds like you were previously expecting? And also how we should think about insurance revenue developing for the rest of the year? And then on the Life & Health Re side, so it's obviously good to see the positive experience variances come through today. I can see that's driven by U.S. mortality experience. Are you able to give us an update on the experience variances related to the previously underperforming portfolio, so Australia, Israel, South Korea, -- were they positive, neutral or negative? Any color there would be helpful.
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesYes, sure. I can do that. So maybe just back to your revenue question. And also, I think I mentioned that in the opening remarks. So it's really 2 drivers for the -- on the P&C reset. One is the renewals outcome. And the renewal outcome is pretty clear. I think we -- as Andreas also said, is on expectations. And then the second one is the cedent update. And you can maybe say the cedent update came in a bit lower than what we expected. And that's something you don't really know until you actually get the underlying data. So that's really the 2 drivers and nothing else there. On the Life & Health Re, absolutely, we have very positive experience now in the U.S. mortality front. All the other portfolios are absolutely in line with expectations. So there's nothing else there, which is exactly what we expect and which is a good outcome.
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesAnd maybe for the outlook there, you were referring to it. Look, we're going to go through the next renewals, and we told you we expect that the trend holds. But I would also highlight that there are opportunities in the market. So it's not all glooming. It's mainly a property and Cat topic. And we see increasing demand, in particular, also through the crisis in various parts of the world. There's not only a downside, there's also an upside. So we see heightened activities around infrastructure investments, increased resilience of nations of critical infrastructures, and that's where we're definitely going to participate. And this will land up in obviously the treaties. -- if the primaries are participating on a single risk basis, we participate through the FA business that definitely will then grow with the investments, but also with CorSo. And I think one should focus on the areas where there's healthy opportunities while we keep the resilience of the group.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Ivan Bokmat from Barclays.
Ivan Bokhmat
AnalystsI've got 2 questions, please. One is on the investment results. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the investment disposals that you've seen this quarter and how does the pipeline looks for those type of gains or perhaps some other form of true-ups later in the year, how should we think about it? And another question is just about the USD 400 million of Middle East reserve that you have established. Maybe you can give a little bit of color of how much of that related to pure inflation impact and how much of that could be the direct impact from the conflict?
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesYes. So let me start on the investment results. So maybe just to step back, the overall investment result at 4.6% is obviously higher than what you would usually expect. Recurring investment is 4.1 and reinvestment -- new investments of USD 4.3 billion was really driven by the disposals on the real estate. This is a one-off. You should not expect that to come in the future quarters. So -- and also, we don't have anything that we would guide you to for additional investment gains. Importantly, I think we have a very strong recurring investment results of 4.1%, and this will continue to be that. And that's higher than what we had in previous years due to the repositioning of the portfolio. On the USD 400 million reserve, this is an inflation. It's an IBNR, first of all, it's an IBNR for impact that might come as a second order impact from the Middle East war. -- we have very negligible first order impact. So we're not really exposed to any claims coming directly from the war. It's all about the second order impact, which really be the inflation, driven by higher energy prices and also disruptions in the supply chain.
Ivan Bokhmat
AnalystsAnd maybe the driver of realized gains was real estate.
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesThe -- sorry, I forgot that. Yes, the driver of the realized gains was real estate and disposals in Switzerland.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Chris Haswell from Autonomous.
Chris Hartwell
AnalystsFirst question is just wanted to come back to the P&C Re combined ratio. I understand the deterioration that you're expecting from rate. But if I look at the year-to-date premium and also the renewal data from both January and April, I mean, there does appear to be -- I assume there would be some duration lengthening through that book and casualty is either flat or growing versus particularly property and nat cat shrinking. So wondering if -- or what we should be thinking about combined ratio development just because of the sort of duration impacts there? And second question, the expense ratio in P&C, obviously ticking up. And with volumes coming down, I was wondering beyond what you've already said about cost initiatives, is there anything more that you could be thinking about to try to protect the combined ratio from an expense side?
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesOkay. So maybe your first question about the combined ratio on the P&C Re side and the lengthening of the book. We don't really see a lengthening of the book, not at all. So also from the renewals side, there's no reason why the book should lengthen. And the only reason maybe that's why the discounting is a bit higher are these additional reserves that we also attributed some of them to the liability book. But other than that, from the pure renewal and development of the portfolio, there's no lengthening of the book. On the expense ratio for the P&C, it increased mainly for 2 reasons. One is just the decline in revenues, clearly and then the other impact is FX. So this is no underlying development there from an expense perspective. So it's purely driven by -- basically by the denominator of the ratio.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from James Shuck from Citi.
James Shuck
AnalystsSorry, but I just wanted to return to the P&C insurance revenues again. So the gross revenues are down 8.5%. But still, I hear what you're saying about the -- some of the contributing factors towards that. But the premium, the renewals year-to-date down 2%. This time last year, you were up kind of 5% or so. I'm just struggling to kind of square that with the gross revenues being down 8.5% at this point, even with the changes to the notifications. And then secondly, can you just unpick the P&C new business CSM for me? So it's down 30% year-on-year. presumably there was some positive FX in that. So what's the constant FX number? And is there any contribution from changing to discounting rates in that? I guess what I'm getting at is if you're saying kind of 3-point increase in the combined ratio at least 30% decline, is that a good rule of thumb going forward? So every point is about 10 points of that new business?
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesOkay. So maybe on the first one, maybe one thing I should just clarify, I wasn't maybe that specific before. When I talk about renewals, we obviously always talk about the 1/1 renewals. But what we also need to reflect here are the renewals that happened still during the second half of 2025. Obviously, we never had a renewals update explicitly, but this also goes into that calculation has mostly happens during the later part of the second half of the year. That's also reflected in the revenue. There are some transactions there that have very low margin, but have a higher revenue. And we had some reductions there, but it has very little bottom line impact. So that should also be reflected in the revenue development here. Now on the P&C re the CSM calculation. So for you, I think that the way to think about it, if we have this new business coming in with a lower premium or lower margin, we said it's about 3 percentage points on combined ratio. And that translates with the revenue, we have about USD 350 million. So I don't think just in percentages, you think in dollars. And then you reduce that from the CSM new business and that we have the year before. The premiums overall are the same, pretty much the same. You have USD 350 million less. That brings you exactly to the number that we disclosed now in Q1.
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesAnd James, just on the other renewals on the revenue development, Anders already mentioned the season updates, which are, of course, a true-up of the renewal information from last year, where the underlying volumes are lower than initially expected, particularly on quota shares.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca.
Vinit Malhotra
AnalystsSo for me, the first one is just on the retrocession changes. I've seen the nat cat YTD is down 11% growth, but only 4% net. It looks like a pretty big shift happening there. Could you just comment a bit about what was done and what are the implications of that? Is it really more risk taken -- or is it margin management? So a little bit of on that looking like a big shift. Second thing is just on the Corporate Solutions. This new business loss component of 77 minus 77 is quite big, and you commented it because of MH business. But I'm surprised, I thought it could be a generic issue with maybe pricing or is there any other drivers there? Or was the MH material enough to bring such a loss component charge? So just curious on that, please as well.
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesOkay. So maybe I'll start on the impact from the retro. And we talked about that in previous meetings also at the management dialogue that we reduced the retro just because we believe it's good business and we can keep it on ourselves. That's why the premium decline actually netting the lower retro is a decline by 4%, whereas if you take the gross number, it's 11%. That's really the -- I think that's the answer. We just kept more of that business on our books, whereas in the previous period, we retroed it out again to the market. Maybe on CorSo, this is the Accident & Health business. Maybe, Andreas, if you want to give.
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesYes. I can confirm Accident and Health remains a strategic priority. It provides still the diversification benefits. That's the reason why we have it. It reduces the overall average expense ratio. So what you see here is that in the U.S., in particular, we had some claims developments. And this reflects also the actions that we took here, and you saw large claim activity in this book, which we haven't seen before. And we don't see it as a trend, but we have seen it in 2025. And this is something that we then address and you should also know that the short-tail nature of this book can actually help us to correct and to introduce corrective actions and then bring the recovery very, very quickly. So that's happening as we speak here in the book. So I wouldn't look at it as a continuum or a trend.
Operator
OperatorThe next question comes from Ben Cohen from RBC.
Benjamin Cohen
AnalystsI had 2 on the Life & Health business. Could you give us a bit more color in terms of the pipeline that you see that gives you the confidence that kind of Q1 was just a bit of volatility in terms of CSM. And I guess related, because of the outlook that you have, do you think that you will actually be able to keep new business CSM at least flat this year? And indeed, do you think that the stock of CSM in Life & Health will actually grow over the course of the year?
Anders Malmstrom
ExecutivesYes. So look, I mean, I think, first, I mean, it's clear that on the Life & Health side, the new business is always a bit lumpy. And obviously, you have the flow business, which is steady, which we have, which is good, but then you have transactions and transactions can be quite volatile. And that's exactly what happened here. We had very good transactions in the first quarter last year. I think now it's a bit less. I think we will see over the next -- we are very convinced actually that over the next 3 quarters, we're going to catch up there. We have a good pipeline that's coming through. We target and we mentioned that before, CSM sustainability, absent any large transactions, that's very important, absent any large transaction, CSM sustainability. That's our main objective here. I mean, I can't go into details, obviously, but I think that the pipeline, I mean, is pretty good. Maybe also to mention here, the longevity transactions that we published talked about in was in March is not yet reflected in these numbers. This is an April 1 transaction that will then come in Q2. Maybe the last point to mention here is also, and you might have seen the announcement yesterday that we now hired a Head of transactions for Life and Health reinsurance. We combined all of that. So that's an important development now that we put more emphasis going forward now also new business on growing the business and also through transactions, which now that the business is on good footage, I think, is the right next step.
Thomas Bohun
ExecutivesI have a follow-up question?
Operator
OperatorWe now have a follow-up from James Shuck from Citi.
James Shuck
AnalystsWith the balance sheet kind of in a strong place and the core earnings now on a much firmer footing, you haven't really done any M&A in recent history. Just kind of what are you thinking about in terms of the pipeline here? And I know you want to grow the Life and Health Re business proportionately. Is there potential for kind of M&A? Would you look to do transactions or something on the open book?
Alexander Andreas Berger
ExecutivesYes. I mean we can repeat what we always said. We are well established with the 3 business units. We have a very nice diversification. We see opportunities in the market. So despite the cyclicality or the cycle management aspect of it, there's still lines of businesses where we can see opportunities. And also geographically, definitely, we can see opportunities. Now having said that, we're always very clear -- we have analyzed the areas through our target liability portfolio approach and have looked at where would we focus on growth, attractive growth and profitable growth organically. And should there be an opportunity to do bolt-on acquisitions like we have done with the QBE credit and surety portfolio that we took over, then we will do so. It adds nicely to the current portfolio to the credit and surety book because it's straight credit, where we were underweight and it diversified nicely. So if at all, you would -- you should expect something like that. But nothing -- we don't need an M&A. We're not a distressed buyer. We have actually a very solid portfolio, and we can weather the storm in the markets.
Thomas Bohun
ExecutivesThank you, James. Are there any more questions?
Operator
OperatorThere are no more questions from the phone.
Thomas Bohun
ExecutivesWe'd like to thank you for your interest and for your questions. Should you have any follow-up questions, please, of course, do not hesitate to contact any member of the IR team. Thank you again for joining the call, and have a good rest of the week.
Operator
OperatorThank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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