Prudential Plc (NYSE:PUK) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call (Q&A) August 28, 2024 4:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Patrick Bowes - Investor Relations
Anil Wadhwani - Chief Executive Officer
Ben Bulmer - Chief Financial Officer
Lilian Ng - Managing Director of Strategic Business Group, China, Hong Kong & Taiwan
Dennis Tan - Managing Director of Strategic Business Group
Solmaz Altin - Managing Director of Strategic Business Group, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia & Africa
Conference Call Participants
Kailesh Mistry - HSBC
Larissa van Deventer - Barclays
Farooq Hanif - JPMorgan
Andrew Crean - Autonomous
Andrew Sinclair - Bank of America
Michael Chang - CGS International
Nasib Ahmed - UBS
Thomas Wang - Goldman Sachs
William Hawkins - KBW
Operator
Good morning, all, and welcome to the Prudential Half Year Results 2024 Live Q&A Session. My name is Adam and I will be your operator today. [Operator Instructions]
I will now hand the floor to Patrick Bowes, Chief of Investor Relations to begin. So Patrick, please go ahead when you're ready.
Patrick Bowes
Thank you, Adam, and good morning, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm delighted. I'm joined by our CFO and CEO. And I'll pass over to Anil to give us some opening remarks.
Anil Wadhwani
Thank you, Patrick. Good morning and good evening, everyone. A very warm welcome to our results call. I'm Anil Wadhwani, CEO of Prudential Plc and I'm delighted to provide you with an update on our first half 2024 results.
Building on last year's exceptional growth of 47%, our new business profit for the first half grew by 8% to $1.5 billion excluding economic effects. This growth was both high quality as well as well-diversified. We improved our new business profit margin through product and repricing actions and reported an encouraging 9% growth in operating profits, supported by our large and growing in-force portfolio.
Our gross operating free surplus generation was very much in line with what we had expected. We continue to focus on cash returns to shareholders, following the $2 billion buyback program, which we launched in the month of June. We are pleased to announce our first interim dividend for 2024 of $188 million, up 9% which aligns with our dividend policy and previous guidance.
We are one year into our five-year strategy and we are seeing encouraging early results from our capability investments as well as disciplined management of financial and operational performance.