Hiscox Ltd Ord New (HCXLF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Well, good morning, everyone. It's wonderful to see you all and thank you for joining us. 2025 has been a pivotal year for Hiscox. In May, we set out our strategy, going deeper into our retail business and making several important commitments. We're executing on that strategy and delivering on those commitments with pace and energy. Our diversified portfolio is built for this market. Growth is accelerating with premiums up $275 million or 6% year over year. This is high quality, profitable growth across each of our businesses, driven by product innovation, expanded distribution and customer growth built on our specialty expertise and technology capabilities. And we're expanding our margins. Our undiscounted combined ratio of 87.8% is the best in a decade. And our record insurance service result is the fifth consecutive year of underwriting earnings growth. And growth is translating into a larger asset base, underpinning a record investment result and contributing to a third consecutive year of record profit before tax. We are delivering excellent returns. with a 12% growth in book value per share and an operating roti of 21%, materially above our target. This strong performance, continuing momentum and execution of our strategy enables us to reward shareholders through a new $300 million share buyback and a further 20% step up in the final dividend per share. As we announced at the CMD last year, This excellent performance, combined with our diversified portfolio, makes our business strongly capital generative. Indeed, over the last three years, we have organically generated over 100 points of regulatory capital, enabling us to deploy capital in an unconstrained way to pursue profitable growth in each of our businesses and reward our shareholders with returns of $1.1...