Beazley plc (BEZ) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to BASELY's 2025 Interim Results Presentation. If you would like to ask a question via the conference call, the signal number pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to Chief Executive Officer Adrian Cox. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2025 BASELY Interim Results Presentation and thank you for dialing in. I will begin with an overview of our performance for the half year. Paul Bantic, our CEO, will take us through the underwriting section. Barbara Plattner-Jensen, our CFO, the financials, and I will finish with some thoughts on the outlook for the rest of the year. So on to the performance overview. I'm very pleased with this year's half-year results. We've generated a profit of 503 million, which is significantly above consensus. an annualized return on equity of over 18%, and a combined revenue share of just under 85%. That stands up very well against the cohort of specialty insurers across the globe with whom we compare ourselves. Last year's profit was a record for us that still stands, but that reflected a very benign period for large and catastrophe losses, which wasn't the case this year, which so far is probably more normal in this period of elevated risk. So far we've seen wildfires in California, Canada and now Europe, a very high number of severe convective storms in the US, a number of airline disasters, large individual fires, cyber attacks across the globe and so forth. The 84.9% combined ratio then is a very strong result and demonstrates both our ability to maintain margin throughout the cycle and the quality of profits that we're producing from the recent years of strong growth. When we compare that to the DMP, the Dowling and Partners Composite Index of Spectr...