Beazley plc (BEZ) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Beasley Annual Results for the year 2023. I am Adrian Cox, the Group CEO, and I'm joined by Sally Lake on the right, our Group CFO, and Bob Kwan on the left, our CUO. So here with the order of play... I'll take you through the highlights. Sally will then go through some of the details from financial performance. Bob will take us through the underwriting performance. I'll share thoughts a little bit after that about how we think about long-term performance and give some guidance for this year, for 2024. And then we'll move on to Q&A. We have a hard stop. at 10 o'clock for two reasons, I think. One, some of us have to get to Admiral for 10.15, and we also have a fire alarm test at 10. So two good reasons, I think, to stop at 9.59. Please do read the disclaimer. And with that done, we'll move on to the results. So a superset of results, I think, this year with record profits of one and a quarter billion, which is over twice as much as our previous record profit, with a combined ratio of 71% or 74% undiscounted. In addition, our insurance written premiums increased by 7% gross and 24% net for the full year, which I think are both in line with the guidance we gave at the third quarter. The net remains considerably higher than the gross because of that reduction in proportional reinsurance that we needed to buy following the capital raise in November 2022, which we've talked about before. all of which gives a combined return on equity of 30% for the year. And so given those numbers, I'm pleased to be able to declare an ordinary interim dividend of 14.2p, which is not surprisingly 5% more than last year, which is sort of what we do, and a share buyback of up to $325 million. I think that success last year demonstrates that our clear st...