Manulife Financial Corp (MFC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 16, 2023 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Manulife Financial Fourth Quarter 2022 Financial Results 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 fourth quarter and year-end 2022 financial and operating results. Our earnings materials, including the webcast live 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 progress in 2022 and an outlook for 2023 by Rory 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 IFRS 17. After the prepared remarks, we will move to the live Q&A portion of the call. We ask each participant to adhere to a limit of 2 questions, including follow-up questions. If you have additional questions, please requeue 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 45, for a 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, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Yesterday, we announced our fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results. We've made significant progress against our strategic priorities and are pleased to have delivered strong results, which are a testament to the resilience and strength of our diverse global franchise. We're especially pleased with these results against the backdrop of the year that was challenging for businesses broadly with multiple headwinds impacting our industry as well as ongoing market volatility.

On our financial results, we're proud of 2 records we achieved in 2022, a record net income of $7.3 billion and the highest ever remittances of $6.9 billion. Meanwhile, we've also driven robust new business value growth in both of our North American segments in 2022, with NBV growth in the U.S. and Canada of 25% and 18%, respectively. This strong performance demonstrates the power of our diversified franchise, given the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions in Asia.