Manulife Financial Corp (MFC) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

May 12, 2022 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Manulife Financial First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. Your host for today will be Mr. Hung Ko. Please go ahead, Mr. Ko.

Hung Ko

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's earnings conference call to discuss our first quarter 2022 financial and operating results. Our quarterly earnings material, including the webcast slides for today's call are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at manulife.com.

Turning to Slide 4. We will begin today's presentation with an overview of our first quarter highlights and an update on our strategic priorities by Roy Gori, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Following Roy's remarks, Phil Witherington, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the company's financial and operating results and provide an update on the key implications of IFRS 17 on Manulife's financial results and key performance indicators.

After the prepared remarks, we will move on to the live question-and-answer portion of the call. We ask each participant to adhere to a limit of two questions including follow-ups. If you have additional questions, please re-queue and we will do our best to respond to everyone.

Before we start, please refer to Slide 2 for a caution on forward-looking statements and Slide 39, we note on the non-GAAP and other financial measures used in this presentation. Note that certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from what is stated.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Roy Gori, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Roy?

Roy Gori

Thanks, Hung. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Yesterday, we announced our first quarter 2022 financial results. Our diversified footprint, operational resilience and proven digital capabilities enabled us to deliver solid results in the first quarter, despite a challenging operating environment caused by the resurgence of COVID-19 and global market volatility.

You'll see on Slide 6, we delivered solid core earnings of $1.6 billion, a modest 4% decrease from the prior year quarter as we continue to benefit from the diversity of our businesses. And we also reported net income of $3 billion, an increase of $2.2 billion over the prior year quarter, reflecting strong investment-related experience and a gain from the closing of the US variable annuity reinsurance transaction.

We achieved new business value of $513 million. The resurgence of COVID-19 and tighter containment measures impacted many of our markets in Asia and lowered NBV. This was partially offset by double-digit growth in both Canada and the US, exemplifying the benefits of our business diversification. While the rapid and unprecedented resurgence of COVID-19 disrupted new business activities in multiple markets in Asia, our diversified digitally enabled and well-established distribution channels delivered double-digit growth in APE sales and NBV relative to the average levels during the first wave of the pandemic in the first and second quarters of 2020. And Global WAM had another quarter of strong net inflows, generating $6.9 billion with positive contributions across all geographies and business lines.