Manulife Financial Corp (MFC) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending September 30, 2022

November 10, 2022 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Manulife Financial's Third 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 third quarter 2022 financial and operating results. Our earnings materials, 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 third 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 additional information on IFRS 17. We will end today's presentation with Steve Finch, our Chief Actuary, who will discuss the company's annual review of actuarial methods and assumptions.

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-ups. 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 41 for a note on the non-GAAP and other financial measures used in this presentation. Note that certain material factors or assumptions are implied 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 third quarter 2022 financial results. I'm incredibly proud of the resilience that our business has demonstrated despite the ongoing challenging market and operating environment and the impact of Hurricane Ian on our property and casualty reinsurance business this quarter. Our financial strength, diversified product offerings and geographical reach as well as the focus on execution of our strategic priorities, are instrumental for our continued success in making decisions easier and lives better for our customers.

We delivered core earnings of $1.3 billion, primarily driven by strong contributions from Canada and resilient results in Asia and Global WAM. And we reported net income attributable to shareholders of $1. 3 billion, reflecting positive investment-related experience, partially offset by a modest net charge from the direct impact of markets during a period of volatile equity markets and rising interest rates. We delivered new business value of $514 million. The lower NBV compared to prior year quarter was primarily driven by lower sales in Hong Kong due to the impact of weaker customer sentiment and lingering pandemic effects in certain markets in Asia. This was partially offset by strong NBV growth in North America, driven by improved margins.