Prudential plc (NYSE:PUK) H1 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 30, 2023 4:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Patrick Bowes - Investor Relations

Anil Wadhwani - Chief Executive Officer

Lilian Ng - Managing Director of Strategic Business Group, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan

Ben Bulmer - Chief Financial Officer

Solmaz Altin - Managing Director of Strategic Business Group, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Africa

Avnish Kalra - Chief Risk & Compliance Officer

Conference Call Participants

Mindy Gao - CLSA

Michael Chang - CGS-CIMB

Charles Zhou - Credit Suisse

Larissa Van Deventer - Barclays

Andrew Sinclair - Bank of America

Farooq Hanif - JPMorgan

Andrew Crean - Autonomous

Leon Qi - Daiwa

Michelle Ma - Citigroup

Kailesh Mistry - HSBC

Ashik Musaddi - Morgan Stanley

Dominic O'Mahony - BNP Paribas

Patrick Bowes

Good afternoon to you in Hong Kong. Good morning elsewhere in the world. It's Patrick Bowes speaking. Thank you for joining us today. In the interest of ruthless efficiency and operating rhythm, we're going to start at exactly 4:30 Hong Kong time. Thank you very much.

I'll pass over to Charlie, our operator for today.

Operator

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Prudential Half Year Results 2023 [ph] live Q&A. My name is Charlie and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to our host, Anil Wadhwani, Chief Executive Officer, to begin. Anil, please go ahead.

Anil Wadhwani

Thank you, operator and thank you, Patrick. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone and a very, very warm welcome to the half yearly results for 2023. I'm Anil Wadhwani. I have taken over the role as Prudential plc's CEO over the last 6 months and I'm delighted to be sharing both the first half results as well as the update on our new strategy.

Right at the outset, we are very pleased with the exceptionally strong performance that we have been able to communicate and delivered in the first half of this year. Our new business profit touched $1.5 billion, registering a growth year-on-year of 39%. And if you were to remove the impacts of interest rate, our growth was even stronger at 52%. Importantly, our margins were resilient and our margins came in at 49% on an overall basis which was more or less flattish to the same time last year. And if, again, you remove the impact of interest rate, our margins improved by 4 percentage points. This was largely driven on account of the strong sales growth. Our sales were in excess of $3 billion, again, a very strong growth of 42% year-on-year. This was underpinned by a strong performance by agency. Agency volumes doubled. And again, this was on the back of the last set of COVID restrictions going away.