Beazley plc (BEZ) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Okay, good morning, everyone. First of all, please enjoy your party favors that we have provided this morning. It's a reward for turning up. For those of you who are dialing in online, unfortunately, we will not be able to send you a bag, but thank you for dialing in. Unfortunately, as is always the way, I seem to have picked up a cold in the last couple of days, so if I have to sneeze, please excuse me. I will try to make sure I mute myself before I do so. But I'm delighted to welcome you to our results presentation. following what's been record profits for the second year in a row, with profits of just over $1.4 billion, which allows us to return $700 million to shareholders this year through an increase in our dividend to 25p and a share buyback program this year of $500 million. It has been another challenging year for the industry. and a more normalised attritional loss ratio for us in the second half of the year, alongside an active hurricane season, as well as a number of systemic cyber events. But even with all this as a backdrop, and I'll just move to the highlight slide, we have delivered an undiscounted combined ratio of 79%, which is within our guidance of around 80% that we provided at the half-year deadline. I think that's testament both to our underwriting and our claims handling capabilities and our commitment to growing profitably. We had a good second half, actually, particularly in the fourth quarter, where we grew more than we had for the first three quarters of the year, which meant we were able to deliver year-on-year growth of 10% in all. Part of this does reflect the consolidation into our account of the staff underwriting scheme. And Barbara will provide a little more detail on that later on. But excluding that, our full year growth was still...