LGGNY - Legal & General Group Plc (LGGNY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-03-11 23:33:07 ET
Legal & General Group Plc (LGGNY)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
March 6, 2024 05:00 ET
Company Participants
Antonio Simoes - Chief Executive Officer
Jeff Davies - Chief Financial Officer
Michelle Scrimgeour - Chief Executive Officer, Legal & General Investment Management
Andrew Kail - Chief Executive Officer, Legal & General Institutional Retirement
Bernie Hickman - Chief Executive Officer, Legal & General Retail
Laura Mason - Chief Executive Officer, Legal & General Capital
Conference Call Participants
Dominic O’Mahony - BNP Paribas Exane
Abid Hussain - Panmure Gordon
Mandeep Jagpal - RBC Capital Markets
Andrew Crean - Autonomous
Farooq Hanif - JPMorgan
Andy Sinclair - Bank of America
Larissa Van Deventer - Barclays
Rhea Shah - Deutsche Bank
Andrew Baker - Citi
Nasib Ahmed - UBS
Thomas Bateman - Berenberg
William Hawkins - KBW
Presentation
Antonio Simoes
Good morning and welcome to our 2023 Results Presentation. It’s a pleasure to be here as the Chief Executive of Legal & General. I’ve met many of you before, and I look forward to working and getting to know all of you over the next months and years ahead.
As well as our results you’d have seen in the RNS, we are announcing today that we will hold the Capital Markets event on the June 12 and that’s when we will share more details of our future strategy. But in a moment, I’ll give you a bit of a flavor of what you can expect from us at that event later this morning.
So before we get going, we have the usual notes on forward-looking statements. And in a very, very unlikely event that you hear the fire drill, there isn’t, if you hear the alarm, there isn’t a fire drill, so please make your way through reception and in front of the building, go back to in front of the building.
So turning to the results. I’m pleased to say that L&G’s 2023 performance illustrates the strength of our market-leading businesses and our resilience in what have been reasonably challenging markets in 2023. We had record new business volumes led by institutional retirement, our PRT business. Therefore, our future store of profits is growing. Our operating profit is robust at £1.7 billion, in spite of those challenging market conditions. And importantly, we are set to achieve our 5-year targets by the end of this year. We set those targets, if you remember, back in 2020. Our balance sheet remains strong with a 224% solvency ratio. And in that context, we are increasing our full year dividend 5% to £20.34. These results are a testament to the hard work of our 11,000 employees, so thank you to all of them. And I want to also give thanks to Nigel Wilson for his role over 14 years and, importantly, for the strong foundations that we have to build upon.
I’ll hand over to Jeff now who is going to talk you through the numbers in more detail, but I’ll come back to give you my early observations on the business and share what you can expect at – to hear at the Capital Markets event on the June 12. Jeff?...
Legal & General Group Plc (LGGNY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript