AEG - Aegon Ltd. (AEG) Q1 2024 Sales/ Trading Statement Call Transcript
2024-05-16 14:43:03 ET
Aegon Ltd. (AEG)
Q1 2024 Sales/ Trading Statement Call
May 16, 2024 03:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Yves Cormier - Head of Investor Relations
Lard Friese - Chief Executive Officer
Matthew J. Rider - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Iain Pearce - Exane BNP Paribas
David Barma - Bank of America
Farooq Hanif - J.P. Morgan
Michael Huttner - Berenberg
Nasib Ahmed - UBS
Presentation
Yves Cormier
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call on our First Quarter 2024 Trading Update. My name is Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Aegon’s CEO, Lard Friese; and CFO, Matt Rider, to take you through our results. After that, we will continue with the Q&A session. But, before we start, we would like to ask you to review our disclaimer on forward-looking statements, which you can find at the back of the presentation.
And now, I would like to give the floor to Lard.
Lard Friese
Yes. Thank you, Yves, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I will start today’s presentation by running you through our strategic and commercial developments before handing over to Matt, to address our first quarter results in more detail.
So, let’s all move to Slide #2 to review the highlights of the quarter. The beginning of the year was marked by continued commercial momentum in the U.S. and Brazil, as well as net inflows at our asset manager. In the first quarter of the year, we reported EUR256 million of operating capital generation and included seasonally higher mortality in the U.S. We remain on-track to meet our guidance of around EUR1.1 billion for 2024.
The capital ratios of our main units in the U.S. and the U.K. remain healthy and well above their respective operating levels. Furthermore, cash capital at the Holding amounts to EUR2 billion well above the operating level despite making good progress executing the EUR1.5 billion share buyback program. At the end of last week, we have completed 92% of this program. As we indicated earlier, we expect to complete the share buyback program by the end of June.
Today, we are announcing a planned new share buyback program of EUR200 million which we expect to start at the beginning of July and to complete by the end of 2024. Commercially, the first quarter of 2024 saw Aegon maintain commercial momentum. The U.K. Workplace business and our business in Brazil are performing well and we recorded net deposits in both segments of our asset manager. At the same time, we continue to see challenges in our U.K. retail business. The U.S. business again performed well. We continue to execute on our strategy to transform Transamerica into America’s leading middle market life insurance and retirement company while continuing to reduce exposure to financial assets.
Before discussing the commercial results, I would like to address the changes we have made to segment reporting in order to better reflect Transamerica’s strategy and business model on Slide #3. We have decided to regroup Transamerica’s businesses from two to four business segments that are fully aligned with our strategy. To reflect the importance of the World Financial Group or WFG for our strategy, we have created the distribution business segment....
Aegon Ltd. (AEG) Q1 2024 Sales/ Trading Statement Call Transcript