Lancashire Holdings Limited (LRE) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, and welcome to the Lancashire Holdings Limited Q2 2026 earnings call. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session. Today, I'm pleased to present Alex Maloney, CEO. Please go ahead with your meeting. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for everyone who joined our call today. As usual, I'll start with the highlights of the six months before handing over to Paul and Natalie to provide more details behind the results. Overall, this has been a strong six-month period for Lancashire, with broadly stable income and an attractive annualised ROE of nearly 20%. This means Lancashire is well positioned to manage and capitalise on the next phase of the insurance cycle. At Lancashire, underwriting comes first and we have a focus on disciplined, profitable growth from a diversified portfolio. You can see the results of this approach in a broadly stable gross return premiums compared with a year ago and an undiscounted combined ratio of 91%. Importantly, we continue to invest in our franchise to diversify our underwriting opportunities. notably with planned expansion in US product lines including inland marine, financial lines and environmental liability. And of course we remain open to opportunities to further build on our highly successful underwriting team. We have made this targeted investment while keeping costs firmly under control, meaning that profit after tax increased by 30% to $142 million and we delivered an annualised ROE of 19.6%. Now thinking about the current environment, let me give you some high level thoughts on where we are in the cycle. As we have seen, pricing across many lines started to soften 12 months ago and in some cases this trend has accelerated in ea...