Admiral Group Plc (AMIGF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-03-06 19:16:05 ET

Admiral Group Plc (AMIGF)

Q4 2024 Results Conference Call

March 06, 2025 05:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Milena Mondini - CEO

Geraint Jones - CFO

Alistair Hargreaves - CEO, UK Insurance

Scott Cargill - Admiral Money, CEO

Costantino Moretti - Head of International Insurance

Conference Call Participants

Abid Hussain - Panmure Liberum

Faizan Lakhani - HSBC

Will Hardcastle - UBS

Thomas Bateman - Mediobanca

Andy Sinclair - Bank of America

Derald Goh - RBC

Rhea Shah - Deutsche Bank

Anthony Yang - Goldman Sachs

Andreas van Embden - Peel Hunt

Carl Lofthagen - Berenberg

Ivan Bokhmat - Barclays

Shanti Kang - Bank of America

Presentation

Milena Mondini

Hello. Hi. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Admiral Group 2024 Results. We're proud to share with you another year of excellent results and progress on many fronts.

I will start with an overview. Geraint will follow up with more detail on financials. Alistair Hargreaves will today take you through our major business, UK Insurance. Alistair succeeded Cristina Nestares as UK Insurance CEO in October. He has big shoes to fill.

His impact to date in his previous roles and knowledge of the business are second to none and is already on a great start. I'm also pleased to announce that Scott Cargill, Admiral Money CEO, also with us today, after he built such a strong business for Admiral, will be joining Alistair team to lead our personal insurance lines of business beyond motor: pet, travel and household paths, like an alternative path to go, an additional path to go alongside motor insurance.

I'm proud that we continue Admiral tradition of developing internal talent also in more senior roles as they built such a strong track record in their previous positions. We are in the process of identifying Scott's successor as CEO of Admiral Money. Costantino will present international results, as usual. He will share a bit more insight than usual on Europe as we decided to postpone the deep dive on Europe that we anticipated at half year. Going forward, we will run annual deep dives dedicated to one area of the business. And this year, we will start with the UK Household insurance instead.

Good. So 2024 was a remarkable year. Finally, after the pandemic, cost of living crisis, major regulatory changes and inflation spikes, the market has been more favorable with inflation reducing and more benign weather. We've been fast to react to market conditions, and I'm glad to be able to share with customers some of these benefits.

We reported 28% turnover growth as we increased our customer base by 14% and as average premiums were higher on average than 2023 across the board. We manage the business with discipline during the inflation spike in 2022 and 2023 and, as a result, started last year from a position of trend, able to reduce rates earlier than most and gain market share.

Group profitability reached GBP 839 million, an all-time high, driven by UK Motor insurance that delivered close to GBP 1 billion of profits. We were proud to see the progress of other lines of business as well with 2 international countries, France and U.S., and the 2 largest business in U.K. beyond Motor, Admiral Money and UK Household, reporting all double-digit profits.

At the same time, we continue to strengthen our capabilities, particularly in data and AI, and successfully completed relevant technology projects. Softer market conditions are continuing in early 2025. We are well positioned, strongly capitalized with the solvency ratio over 200% and happy with the business we are underwriting now. We will continue to remain disciplined, as always, and adapt as needed.

So a bit more color on 2024. Great momentum with GBP 1.3 billion increase in turnover and 1.4 million increase in policy number. Main growth driver was UK Motor, particularly in the first half of the year with around 0.5 million additional customers at the end of H1. But other lines of business in U.K. were material contributors too with the progressive migration of More Than customer in the second half.

The integration is proceeding well. The teams are working well together, and we are confirming our expectation for the value creation of this deal....

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