Prudential plc ADR Stock

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Prudential plc 2026 Half Year Results Q&A Audio Webcast Call. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand over to Patrick Bowes. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Alex, and good afternoon, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Prudential plc's First Half 2026 Results Analyst and Investor Call. Before I turn over to our CEO, Anil and Ben, our CFO, I have a couple of housekeeping points. A recording of today's call will be available from Tuesday next week. Our full results package is available on our website, and I'll refer you to the disclaimers and safe harbor wordings in these documents, and they also apply to this call.

Anil will start. Ben will start the call with opening remarks, followed by a Q&A. And also on the call today are Angel, Dennis, Rajeev, Naveen from our Group CEO GEC members. And now let me pass over to Anil, our CEO, to start us off.

Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The strength and resilience of our multi-market multichannel platform across our insurance and asset management businesses allow us to deliver consistent high-quality growth. We've been focused on accelerating the conversion of new business profit into cash, thereby generating sustainable and growing shareholder returns. I'm really pleased with the progress we have made in the last few years and our strong track record of delivery as we transform and modernize Prudential. We have repositioned our Hong Kong business by substantially growing the domestic franchise.

It now generates 50% of the new business profit in this key segment, improved our Chinese Mainland operations through better product mix, risk management and strong levels of capital, demonstrated the breadth of our diversification with ASEAN markets growing new business profit by 13% and our Indian and African businesses growing double-digit APE. Alongside our insurance operations, our asset management business grew underlying profits by 20% -- in addition, we have focused on our strong proprietary channels of agency and bancassurance, driving productivity and expanding our bancassurance footprint.

We launched a multiyear transformation of our agency operations with productivity and quality recruitment being the key priorities. I'm very pleased that we have reported progress in these areas in both our developed markets and our emerging ASEAN businesses. We have built out our market-leading health and protection operations, helping our customers navigate the post-COVID medical inflation while delivering significant operating improvements.

Driving innovation, AI adoption and high-quality customer experience has been a focal point of our $1 billion investment program in technology, in distribution, health and customer. We have also set clear priorities for capital allocation with a comprehensive and sustainable capital management framework. We are making good progress in delivering over $7 billion of returns to our shareholders from 2024 to 2027. And rounding off last year, we completed a highly successful IPO of our asset management operations in India, creating substantial value for our shareholders and are in the process of returning it.

Most recently, you may have seen we are moving towards meeting the initial 15% free float requirement. This will generate proceeds of approximately $0.3 billion, which will be added to our 2026 share buyback. Coming to our first half results. We continue to build on the track record of our delivery. We have invested further in our high-performing business in Malaysia through increasing ownership, and we have fundamentally repositioned our India business through taking control of the 2 complementary insurance platforms of life and health. In the first half of 2026, we grew new business profit by 8%, we grew earnings per share by 17% and free surplus generation was up 15% as well as we increased our first interim dividend per share by 15%. Our first half 2026 performance was well rounded, and we remain very disciplined on both quality and our execution. I have 3 clear messages to our investors. First, we remain firmly focused on the delivery of our guidance for 2026 of double-digit growth across our key financial metrics and on achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

Second, we are progressing well in our transformation agenda, continuing to build capabilities and modernizing our operations and technology platform. Third, we remain highly disciplined in allocating capital. We are investing for quality growth, driving attractive margins and sustainable growth in capital generation. With our multi-market, multichannel model and our drive for quality growth, I'm excited with our prospects in the growing markets of Asia and Africa.

Now I will hand it over to Ben, our CFO, to walk through the financial highlights.

Thanks, Anil, and hello, everyone. So as Anil has mentioned, in the first half of 2026, we delivered double-digit growth in EPS, DPS, gross OFSG and 8% growth in new business profit. We remain firmly focused on high-quality growth in new business with high IRRs and short payback periods, the compounding effects of which are driving strong capital generations and earnings. The new business margin expanded 2 percentage points to 40% and further focus on improvements in agency performance and increasing the proportion of health and protection business within our new business mix provides us opportunities to continue to improve margins over the medium term. Our embedded value per share ex-goodwill reached USD 15.27 or GBP 11.50 and our return on embedded value is 15% with scope to improve this further by 2 to 3 percentage points.

The management of our in-force book continues to improve, and we are pleased that our underlying variances are back in positive territory. This is an important milestone and reflects actions in strengthening claims management, growing revenue premiums and containing costs. These improvements will allow us to continue to invest in our business on a normal course basis while delivering sustainable positive variances as we move forward. We continue to benefit from strong persistency. And in Hong Kong, that is 99%.

We will largely complete our capability investment program in 2026 with an investment of between $300 million and $350 million, and we're confident of returning to positive variances north of $200 million in 2027. In short, we're pleased with our capital generation trajectory. Gross OFSG is up 15% year-on-year and net OFSG is up 41%. We'll continue to build on this momentum as we work towards and beyond our 2027 objective year. The Group's capital position remains highly robust, and we have a conservative level of gearing.

Our free surplus ratio as of 30th of June was 209% or 200%, excluding the remaining net proceeds from the AMC IPO, consistent with the 175% to 200% range we've set out. In January, we launched a combined $1.2 billion buyback to be completed by the end of 2026. And as Anil indicated, with today's capital market actions, we have a further GBP 0.3 billion of buyback to be completed by the year-end. We continue to expect to return a further $1.3 billion in 2027, all contributing to over $7 billion of capital being returned to shareholders between 2024 and 2027.

In summary, we delivered a significant improvement in financial performance in the first half of 2026 with quality growth across our key financial KPIs. Looking forward, we are firmly focused on delivering our 2026 guidance of double-digit growth in our KPIs and our 2027 financial objectives. Prudential has leading positions in the highly attractive markets of Asia and Africa, -- we are generating attractive margins and are positioning the business to deliver double-digit performance for many years to come. With that, I'll pass back to Patrick.

Thank you, Ben and Anil. And I'll now hand over to Alex, our call operator, who will provide instructions and open the lines for questions. Please remember to give your name and organization that you represent when asking your question. And please submit your questions online. In particular, if you're on a mobile phone and just for the benefit of everybody else, to be able to hear properly, please do use the online service or dial in to the VoIP, it's much clearer. Over to you, Alex.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first caller is Kailesh Mistry from Bank of America. Your line is now unmuted, please go ahead.

It's here. So first one predictably is on new business value in Hong Kong. Anil, thank you for your guidance of double-digit growth for 2026. A couple of things I wanted to unpick here. Could you help us better understand your base case for the second half? Should we think about the domestic growth continuing at the 20-plus level and the MCV kind of at the level we saw at the first half? And also, how much should we expect to be driven by margin versus volume?

So that's the first question. Second question is just on new business strain. Obviously, sales up 3%, 4%. Strain was 11% lower. What were the key drivers here? And are they sustainable? Or should we still have the 11% to 12% of APE guidance in our mind? And then lastly, just on India very quickly. In terms of the asset management business, is your intention to get the -- meet the free criteria and then stop at that point and keep your stake stable? Or are you thinking something else there?

And Ditto on IPRU, should we expect all the proceeds to be used for reinvestment in the new entity? Or could we see some coming back to shareholders?

Thanks, Kailesh. Many questions there. So let me first start with the Hong Kong question and the margin question, and then I will pass on to Ben for the new business strain as well as the question on AMC and IPRU. So firstly, let me just kind of zoom out and give you a little bit of color on our Hong Kong business. So I really like the shape of where our Hong Kong business is. As you would remember, Kailesh, coming out of COVID, we were highly skewed towards the Chinese Mainland visitor business. We are now very much in balance. 50% is Chinese Mainland and 50% is domestic. You're right in pointing out that our domestic business did very well, grew by 22%.

And it also underscores, in many ways, the focus that we've been employing on quality. We are very focused on driving our proprietary channels and the quality came through quite strongly with the 7 percentage points improvement that we saw in our margins. Additionally, we are a multichannel growth engine model. You would have noted the strong performance on bancassurance. And a combination of these factors are likely to continue in the second half of this year. To your specific question on CME, I'll try and keep the answer short. We are not seeing any abatement in terms of the drivers of demand.

We are constantly in touch with our agents as well as with our customers. And the structural demand drivers for why Chinese Mainland customers buy in Hong Kong, that seems to be very strong. So strong domestic margin improvement, strong bancassurance. We are working very hard on improving our agency performance, and that gives us the positive outlook for taking Hong Kong to double digit for the full year, including upping our performance in the second half. I'm going to pause there and pass it on to Ben.

Okay. Thanks, Anil. Kailesh, -- so if I take these in order, on new business strain, what you're seeing is the benefit of a slight shift in product mix. There's a bit more par in the mix. So we're more capital efficient. There's also some nuances in country mix. Look, what I think I'd steer you to going forward is to continue to use 11%, 12% in terms of APE when you think about modeling strain. To your question on the free float, I think you've seen from today's actions, making steps towards meeting our free float requirements. Initially, I think as you'll recall, that was a 15% free float, but that then ups to a 25% free float. The proceeds, as you've seen, add to an already very healthy free surplus ratio. And of course, we're not going to retain capital we don't need.

So they're being returned to shareholders. I think stepping back on the opportunity, India remains a very strategic market for the Group and asset management more broadly an important wealth enabler. Your question on IPL sell-down. Well, this firstly is subject to successful completion of our acquisition of Bharti. We are in discussions with the relevant parties around the sort of timetable of reducing shareholdings. As we said in our presentation, we'll want to retain a portion of the proceeds from the sell-down, not just to fund the initial acquisition, but also to fund investment in the Prudential Bharti platform to accelerate growth. There will, however, be residual proceeds.

We expect these to add once again to a very healthy free surplus ratio. And hopefully, you can see by our behaviors what that's likely to mean.

Just one additional point from my side, Kailesh. So we now have complementing channels of both life and health in India. And pleased to share that we have started writing our first set of policies on the health business from earlier this month.

And remember, this is a joint venture where we have control with HCL and delighted with the fact that we've been able to launch our health business in a market as strategic as India.

Our next caller is from Andrew Crean at Autonomous Research.

A couple of things. Ben, I think you said that the new business contribution to 2027 gross operating free surplus generation would move in line with new business in the '26 contribution, whereas I think it was up 42% in the first half. Just wanted to clarify that you think that the contribution for '26 will be roughly 10% or in line with new business profit growth.

Secondly, could you talk about MDRT active agent numbers in first half 2026 within your 55,000 total and how much they grew? And then thirdly, Ben, you talked about the ROV being 15% and the scope to improve it by 2 to 3 points over time. Where do you see that coming from? Do you see it coming from stronger new business from positive operating variances or from shrinking the embedded value denominator?

Thanks for your questions, Andrew. So why don't we first go to the new business contribution to free surplus generation, let Ben answer that. I'll have Naveen address your MDRT question, and then we kind of come back to the ROE one.

Yes. Thanks, Andrew.

So the 42% increase represents really 2 things. One, as you appreciate, is sort of moving on one policy year and the other is growth in the book. And so another way to express that, if I think about the 2026 new business contribution to the 2027 target. There's a couple of things. One is actually the cash generation signature we're writing is very much in line with the 2025 cohort of new business. And that would have added, and you can see this in our accounts, EUR 0.5 billion of contribution to 2027. So I would start with that as a base and then simply grow that by the growth we're putting on the book in 2026, if that makes sense. Do you want me to pick up...

Growth in new business profits or sales?

Profits, Andrew, profits.

Let's go to the MDRT and then we'll come to the ROE question.

Okay. Thank you, Anil. Andrew, thanks for your question. Let me answer it like this. I think firstly, as we have shared in the past, we remain very focused on improving the productivity of our agency force, one aspect of which is growing our MDRT franchise. We are very proud that we are the #2 MDRT franchise, and we look to strengthen that position this year. As you've seen from the numbers, our NBP per active has grown a further 9% in H1 this year. And this has happened because of 5 initiatives, which we will continue to accelerate through the second half of this year. Very briefly, I think the first one is we will continue to pivot the quality of our recruitment towards high-quality schemes like PR Ventures, which have scaled up already in markets of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia and which have been relaunched and refurbished in markets of Indonesia and Philippines.

Second, we have launched for the first time this year, a group-wide PR MDRT program, which kind of creates benefits capability building and incentives for our MDRTs across all markets. And you will recall, we had also made compensation changes early on in the year, favoring high productivity agents, which we expect to see some benefits come through in the second half of the year in particular. Third, we have had good success with launch of affluent propositions. Our case sizes have increased by 6% in H1 this year. You would have noticed that number. and we are poised for some more affluent proposition launches in our key markets in the second half. So that will be an additional fillip.

Fourth, Ben already mentioned that we've pivoted quite strongly to health and protection, which has been a driver of our margins. And we have further initiatives to enhance health and protection in our agency channel.

And last but not the least, there's significant investment in AI and technology in the agency platform to drive productivity. Our PRUAction 1.0, which is our AI module for performance management is now live in Singapore at scale across 5,000 agents. I'm pleased to share that regular users have improved productivity by more than 13%. Now on your specific question of what is the actual growth in the MDRT numbers. What I can share is the following that MDRT is a full year phenomenon. We are at the half year stage. And we will continue to focus on our MDRT initiatives as we go forward.

What I can share specifically is that the contribution of MDRT and the strong pipeline that we have on MDRT. So I'm now in particular, referring to agents who've already crossed 70% of MDRT threshold at the half year mark. The contribution of APE from this cohort and people who have already become MDRTs remains exactly what it was last year. So we are pretty much dead on where we were last year, and we will look to accelerate in the second half of this year. Thank you.

And then coming back to your ROE question, Andrew.

So the start point for that is double-digit growth in new business. We are a double-digit business. The opportunity for the additional 2 to 3 points is really twofold. One, completion of the investment in capability program you're aware of, but also then improving variances. And I'm pleased with the progress we've made in that regard. As you will have seen, we're back to net positive underlying variances, positive underlying claims experience. What we'll now start to benefit from is scale coming through ultimately and greater operating leverage. And there's a slide in the appendix to my presentation showing our operating leverage ratio improving 40 bps in the period. So that's where you're going to see the uptick.

Our next caller is Nasib Ahmed from UBS.

Three for me. Firstly, can I unpack the double-digit growth for the group in NBP? You're guiding China broadly flat. I get Hong Kong is going to be double digit, but what's kind of pulling up the rest of the business? Second, on Malaysia, saw MDRT 2026 was up 4% new business profit is pretty good as well. Where can you actually get -- can you get any learnings from this Malaysia business and kind of get them on to other places and geographies as well? And then finally, on the short-term variances below the line, the USD 626 million, where -- where does it come from? Is there anything that's actually economic versus non-economic in there? China is typically an economic move?

Thanks, Nasib.

So let me take the first one, and I'll go to Naveen on the second and Ben on your third question. So we are firmly focused on delivering our guidance of double-digit growth across a range of financial metrics and pretty much kind of lining that up as we look at our objectives for 2027 as well. You're right in pointing out that we believe that we'll carry some of the positive developments in Hong Kong into the second half. We also believe that the growth will resume in China. We are taking a number of steps to firstly, conform to the new expense regulations as well as have a slew of actions in force to be able to get our product mix in balance.

So that should hopefully get us to a positive growth in the second half in China. But at the end of the day, we are a multi-growth or rather multi-market growth model. So if you look at our Malaysia business, it did very well. Thailand had an outstanding first half. We believe that we can take the growth in Singapore from mid-single digit to high single digit, if not early double digit. And we are also starting to see a turnaround come through in our Vietnam business.

So remember, the Vietnamese business has been a negative growth for us, and it's starting to now flatten out to getting marginally positive -- and we are hopeful that it will start to grow as we kind of go through the second half of this year. So we have a number of markets that will complement some of the growth that we are going to see in Hong Kong, which gives us the belief that we will be able to get to our guidance for 2026. I'm going to go to Malaysia, which had a very strong performance. Naveen, you want to tee that up?

Sure. Thanks, Anil. And Nasib, thanks for the question on Malaysia. So as you have seen in the numbers, Malaysia grew very strongly in the first half, led by an outstanding performance from agency in particular. And if you recall, agency, we had shared last time had turned the corner in the second half of the year. And Malaysia is second half of last year, I mean.

And Malaysia is the one emerging ASEAN market where our agency transformation is the furthest in its implementation. And to your specific question, there are 3 big learnings, I think, coming out of Malaysia, which will sustain the performance of Malaysia through the next few quarters, but also help us in our other ASEAN markets. The first one is focus on quality recruitment. We had talked about this last time as well that the PRUVentures program is at scale in Malaysia, and we are seeing the incoming class of recruits actually drive productivity, which is 5 to 6x the normal organic recruits. And increasingly, the focus is to make sure that we have more and more share coming from the PRUVenture recruits.

The second one is a tailored proposition for the agency. largely on health and protection, but also a set of propositions addressing the HNI and affluent needs in the Malaysian markets has worked really well in the first half for us. And those are learnings that we will also take forward to other markets, particularly Indonesia, Philippines, where we have launched PRUVentures or refurbished it in the first part of this year, and we are looking to launch some of these protection and affluent propositions in the second half. And third, very pleased to also share that Malaysia had very strong growth in active agents in the first half. This was 10% plus on the back of some of the ways of agency management initiatives that we have put in place. And again, those give us learnings for some of the emerging ASEAN markets as we move forward. So all in all, strong performance from Malaysia, sustainable growth as we see it going forward, particularly driven by agency and lots of learnings that we are already taking to other emerging ASEAN markets.

Just one additional point for me. So while we remain positive about the growth prospects in Malaysia in the second half on account of all the reasons that Naveen has mentioned, I do expect the growth to moderate in the second half versus the first half. I'm going to go to Ben for your third question.

Yeah Nasib, so 2 elements really to the IFRS non-op result. Firstly, lower rates in China that lowered the discount rate that we applied to the GMM contracts and lower spreads. And then secondly, higher rates more broadly across many of our markets. So there was a mark-to-market impact on both bondholdings backing shareholder business. But also you then have the sort of discounting effect getting us to a lower present value of future profits on health and protection business. So arguably, a lot of those movements sort of discount rate related as opposed to underlying economics.

What I would point out, I'm sure you've noticed actually, that we have positive unlocking in the CSM that goes some way to offsetting that minus 0.6%. There's 0.4 positive of unlock, and that's to do with better-than-expected long-term equity returns across a number of our markets.

Our next caller is Michael Chang from CGSI.

I've got a few questions. I'll start with Mainland China. Started off the year very strongly. Then obviously, we've got some regulatory impacts that impacted 2Q and quite possibly a bit of the second half as well. I really appreciate the additional disclosure in terms of the quarterly trends for the Mainland China business. But can I just get a sense in terms of seasonality, what typically is a normal seasonality pattern within Mainland China? Because typically, 1Q tends to be very strong and 4Q tends to be very weak. So I'm not really sure how to actually interpret the numbers as to how high 3Q base is and how low 4Q base is. I mean, when I talk to some of the other insurers, it's typically maybe about 30% or 35% and 20%, 25%, 25% and then the last quarter might be about 15%. Is that fairly similar for Mainland China business?

Secondly, if I go across to Singapore.

Singapore is a market whereby I think well APE has been very strong, but margins have been lagging a bit. So maybe I can just get a sense for when markets start to turn around and when the agency performance will start to see a bit more of an improvement because it seems to be very much bancassurance driven at this stage. And then lastly, bancassurance is clearly -- sorry, OFSG the inflection point, taking a look at the growth as of the first half and likely for the full year, we're looking at probably mid-to-high teens, which means that to meet the 2027 target, next year, OFSG growth will be clearly at the high end of the inflection point over 20%. How then should we be thinking about modeling going forward post 2027?

So let me start with your first 2 questions, and then I'll go to Ben for the free surplus generation one.

So in China, as you know, we have been very focused on driving transformation over the last 3.5 years. And you saw that come through quite emphatically in our 2025 results. We carried that momentum quite strongly into 2026. You're right to point out that quarter 1 typically tends to be the door opener, which tends to be the biggest quarter in the year. We did see the impacts of a higher-than-expected PAR mix as well as regulatory changes in quarter 2. And as we look to the second half, we are focused on 3 things. One, we have a big comparator base in quarter 3 in China. July, August and specific were very strong months for us in 2025. So that is something that we have to deal with.

From September onwards, the competitors start to ease quite significantly. So to your question, the shape of how we're going to grow in China or how we deliver the new business profit in China is likely to be slightly different from what you probably witnessed in 2025. In terms of your second question on Singapore, we saw growth both across agency and bancassurance on volumes. And the challenge for us was the new rules that came in with respect to co-payment.

And this is where we had to adjust to the new health guidelines that the government introduced, which had a knock-on impact, as you rightly pointed out, on margins. In Singapore, we provide the entire spectrum of products, as you can imagine, and we have launched newer protection products to extend our health continuum as well as launch innovative products to address the needs of the high net-worth and the ultra-high net-worth customers. And that kind of gives us the confidence that some of these shorter-term challenges around the health -- or the changes to the health regulations, we will be able to offset that as we go through the second half of this year. Remember, we are a household brand in Singapore, very strong on both agency as well as on account of our partnership with Standard Chartered and UOB in Singapore. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to go to Ben for the free surplus question.

Yes. Thanks, Anil. Michael. So look, we're very pleased with our progress on the capital generation front, very confident in delivering our 2027 OFSG target of $4.4 billion. There's a slide in the appendix to my presentation that sets out the development of the free surplus ratio. I think it's useful to think in terms of those building blocks. When you model OFSG going forward beyond 2027. Look, in short, the in-force generation, the expected transfer continues to grow strongly. I mean, as you know, from our past comments, we've calibrated dividends and the additional recurring capital returns to be sustainable and allowing for those, we expect to be at the upper end of our free surplus range.

So when you model that out, allow for the acceleration you referred to, to our objective of 4.4%. I think as I said before, I continue to guide you to required capital growing early double digit. I mentioned the sort of rough yardstick to use for new business strain earlier on this call. Central costs will remain fairly flat. Which I think then gives you all of the ingredients. Non-operating a bit harder to give guidance on.

As you know, that's the sort of market movements effects on regulatory balance sheets, some of which aren't necessarily economic in nature. And you can see from the slide that actually pre-capital returns, if you annualize it, we're generating mid-double-digit growth in the free surplus ratio. So hopefully, that gives you a sense.

Our next caller is Michelle Ma from Citi.

So yes, first, congratulation on the results despite a very challenging environment with a very high base. So I have 2 questions. So first is on CPL. So I think 2026 is not a typical year given so many kind of disruptions and product mix changes. Just wonder given the PAR products already accounted for more than almost 80% in the first half and it resulted in some notable margin deterioration. Can we say we kind of finished product mix change. And currently, we are quite satisfied with the product mix. And the next year, there won't be -- there won't be such kind of drastic margin deterioration. And next year, there won't be any kind of high base or one-off disruption. So that China business, we are confident to go back to the trajectory of high growth. This is my first question on margin deterioration and the sustainable level of growth for [indiscernible].

The second question is Hong Kong. It's very interesting, and we appreciate you share the result of survey in the next 12 months, there are still like 74% of CME they have planned to Hong Kong and 88% of them they are going to buy insurance products. Just wondering if there is any more you can disclose of this survey because we are seeing the [indiscernible] they disclosed which type of products they will be more interested given the current the ongoing concern over the taxation of offshore insurance products. Just want to have a sense how our Hong Kong MCV product mix are going to change given you have done such a fantastic survey.

Michelle, thanks for this question. So let me start with the second one because as you can imagine, we are in constant touch with our customers and with our agent partners, and we've kind of shared some of the slides in terms of the feedback that we are receiving. In fact, I'm happy to share we've just received the feedback on the most recent survey that we conducted in August. And the feedback is very much similar to what we have already kind of shared on our slides, which kind of gives us the confidence that the demand drivers as to why Chinese Mainland visitors buy policies in Hong Kong pretty much remains intact. And as I said, we will continue to kind of stay close because there's a lot of news flow, as you can imagine, right now. And we are in constant touch with both our agents as well as our customers.

So I'm going to stop there. I'm going to go to your CPL question on the first half, what are we doing in second half and specifically the guidance on margin. Angel?

Sure. Thank you, Anil.

Thank you for the question, Michelle. I think we rightfully pointed out that this year, you are seeing 2 things happen in CPL. One is the regulatory change in the banker expense alignment. And the other one is the pronounced shift of the product mix shift to PAR. So CPL, as you know, has been successfully shift in the product mix to PAR coming up from a low single digit to 40% last year and first half is 76% -- so that gives a bit of a margin compression that you're seeing. However, we have quickly pivoted to protection business in quarter 2, especially in agency, which we have seen quarter-on-quarter margin uplift already.

Second half, we will focus on protection product and optimizing margins for par savings product. In August, actually, many of the non-par products have been onboarded to most of our partner bank. So you'll be expecting that full year, we want to normalize our par mix to about 60%.

Michelle, just in terms of what you can expect from a margin perspective, we are right now working towards a full year margin in China of about 40% versus 43% for the full year of 2025.

Our next caller is Farooq Hanif from JPMorgan.

Three questions, if I may. First one, actually, just taking everything you've just said on new business, you've given quite a lot of detail on building blocks, I think it's very helpful. So thank you for that. But I just want to look big picture. So you used the word firmly confident on new business profit double-digit growth for '26. I think in 1Q, you said firmly committed. In 1Q, you used the word confident. I just want to know from you I mean is there any change here? I mean, do you think there's a very high probability you will deliver this? Or are you trying to say, guys, we're trying our best, but it's an uncertain environment. I just want to understand the messaging that you're trying to give because I think there's a big debate about that this morning.

Second question is long-term vision for India. You're replacing a really big partnership in life, but with a low share and have lost market share in India for a much bigger partnership where you'll have control and a health venture. I mean, at what point does this look greater than or equal to what you have already in your estimation, given if we assume a world where you get regulatory approval, et cetera? And my last question very quickly for Ben is, I know there's been some changes in the IFRS profit and the CSM and investment margin. Can you just give any guidance on some of those items? I mean you talked about CSM growth already, but just on the investment margin and any other items.

Thanks, Farooq. So let me start with the first question on guidance. I'll go to Naveen on India and the IFRS 1 to Ben. So the short answer is we are not changing our 2026 guidance. And as I said, that we are firmly focused on executing against our half 2 goals to get to that guidance as well as firmly focused on our 2027 financial objectives. We have to navigate a couple of things. One is the high comparator base, both in Hong Kong and in China in July and August, which materially starts to ease from September onwards. And again, we've given you a lot of color, both in terms of Hong Kong as well as in terms of the actions that we are enforcing in China to get the China trajectory back to where it needs to be.

The second is we obviously have to go through the transition on the expense guidelines in bancassurance. And again, Angel kind of gave a little bit of color in terms of what you can expect, both in terms of the new business launches as well as what it would do to pivoting back to a much more balanced set of product mix and the knock-on impact it would have on improvements of margin versus what we witnessed in the first half of this year. So those are the things that we are navigating. But at no point in time, we are changing our guidance to 2026 as well as our belief in the 2027 financial objectives. I'm going to stop there. I'll go to the India question to Naveen and then Ben, if you can pick up the IFRS one.

Okay. Thanks, Anil.

So as Anil already mentioned, Farooq, that India is a strategic pivot for us in terms of how we approach the market.

And subject to regulatory approval of our life insurance transaction, we will have this very unique position in India of being the multinational insurer, which is straddling both the stand-alone health vertical as well as the life insurance vertical. And we also have this unique position that we'll be partnering with 2 exceptional corporate groups, HCL on the health insurance side and Bharti on the life insurance side. And we believe these 2 platforms in partnerships with these excellent corporate groups will give us a significant opportunity to take a crack at the very large unmet protection gap on both mortality and morbidity side. So that's the long-term thesis.

Our priority in the next 3 to 5 years is really to build out a high-quality profitable business. That's really what our aim is. And the elements of that are that we believe that there are significant customer segments who have unmet needs. And interestingly, they range from the missing middle in the health to the high net worth on the life side to the cross-border opportunity on health as well.

So we will be very selective, but very sharp about the opportunities that we look to target from these 2 platforms. Second, the big opportunity remains that we have an opportunity to build out agency in a quality manner, learning from what we have done in some of our other markets and focusing it on health and protection. The Indian market, particularly on the life side today, remains very heavily savings and ILP focused, and we will be looking to have a differentiated play there. Third, Bharti, in particular, Bharti Life already has a bunch of bancassurance partnerships with some of the best banks in the country, and we'll be looking to scale that up in addition to leveraging the partnership that we have with Standard Chartered on both the life and the health franchise.

And last, I think within both HCL and Bharti, we have some very interesting opportunities in their ecosystem in both of these corporate groups. As an example, Bharti has 450 million customers, out of which 50 million are postpaid and high-value customers. India is a highly digital market. We'll be looking to innovate and invest in D2C, digital, AI to see how we take a crack at this opportunity and look to convert a reasonable fraction of these customers to our protection products, both on the life and health side. And I think the last point I will make on India is that it's a very large geography. We will be focused on about -- in the next 5 years, to your question, in about 100, 120 cities. We have a very disciplined geography strategy in terms of accessing revenue pools, but also balancing it with claims experience and profitability that we see and how we think about thoughtful build-out of these channels.

Long story short, I think in the next 5 to 10 years, you should expect India to be a material franchise for us on multiple metrics. But in the next 5 years, we are looking to just build out elements of the business that I outlined.

Thanks, Naveen. Ben?

Farooq, thanks for your question. So maybe it's best to refer to Slide 34 in my pack and just walking up that table. Obviously, we were very pleased with the 17% growth in OPAT per share, which meant underlying OPAT growth of 13%. The noncontrolling interest reduction was related to Malaysia, of course, and that gave us a growth rate benefit, all of which got us to 9 points of sort of operating profit before tax growth. Within that, and I've sort of guided before, we'll continue to keep central costs tightly controlled. My restructuring cost guidance of coming in for the full year at just under GBP 100 million remains. Moving up to the total segment result, the key part of which or the largest part of which is, of course, insurance.

We were very pleased with strong growth in the release from the CSM. That was somewhat curtailed by a lower net investment result that I previously guided to. And that was driven by 2 things: one, asset derisking in China; and two, lower surplus in our Life businesses as a result of higher remittances.

That effect will start to normalize somewhat on the growth rate as we progress through this year, and I'd expect a net investment result that's a couple of points higher. Finally, then there's the progress we're making on variances. And as we accelerate into 2027, the benefits from that plus lower investment in capabilities will come through the earnings results. So I think given stepping back, given the strong structural growth in the CSM since inception of IFRS 17 to now. And now I think our CSM is about 30% higher than it was then. And what I just mentioned on improving underlying variances, I'm very confident in the double-digit EPS growth outlook for the group on an IFRS basis.

Alex, I want to be respectful of people's time. We're going to shortly close down. We've got 3 more questions that we're going to take. Can we have a bit of rapid fire question and we'll do the rapid fire answering. Next one, please Alex.

Our next caller is William Hawkins from KBW.

First question, please, just -- I am still trying to understand the outlook for new business growth. I'm sorry about that. But could you just pause again on the growth markets? And in the second half, should they be accelerating from the 10% that you've achieved in the first half because of the good stuff like Thailand and Vietnam that you're referring to? Or is there still a risk that they're decelerating because there's other big moving parts like Taiwan. So I'm sorry, that's quite a significant division, and I'm still not quite clear about the different moving parts in that.

And I would have thought longer term, the growth markets should be blowing through your double-digit target, not kind of just making up with the double-digit target. So I'm just trying to get comfortable on that short term and long term, please. And then secondly, and I'll just keep it at 2 questions. Again, you've already talked convincingly about productivity in the MDRT in the agency channel. I'm still slightly disappointed that there was a decline in the total number of active agents down to the 55,000. I thought that with Malaysia stabilizing, we'd be back into kind of growth in that number.

So I appreciate the improvement in quality. I'm still slightly uncertain about the quantity. So from your point of view, do you just not care because that's a very bad metric as long as you've got the other metrics working? Or at some point, should the active agents be returning to growth? And if so, can you give me a thought process about the time line for that, please?

Thanks, William. So on your question on growth markets, we believe that we have a range of markets in the -- in that segment that will continue to perform quite well as we look to the second half. So you could expect a double-digit to probably a mid-teens growth in the new business profit growth for these markets because as you rightly pointed out, there are significant markets like Taiwan, Thailand has done exceptionally well for us. Africa continues to kind of grow very well. So you could expect, as I said, double-digit to mid-teens growth as we go through the second half.

On the whole agency piece, before I kind of hand it over to Naveen. The focus on quality has been quite deliberate. And we are pressing 2 levers, William. One is, as we've said, quality recruitment, driving active agents. And we've kind of launched a number of initiatives in that regard to be able to kind of press forward not only in developed, but also in emerging ASEAN market. And the second is productivity. And you've seen year after year, we have shown measurable improvements on productivity. Firstly, because we are getting a, on the demand side, we are getting demand for high-quality advice. But on the second front, we are also up-tiering our propositions to emerging affluent as well as to affluent customers. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to have Naveen provide you a little bit of additional color on productivity versus active agents.

Thanks, Anil. Under instruction from Patrick, I'll keep the answer rapid fire and focused. I think just coming to your specific question on actives, I just want to partition the problem. Firstly, on the developed markets, as you have seen from '23 to '25, we've grown our actives by 15% per annum, more than 15% per annum. H1 this year, developed markets, Hong Kong, Singapore, actives are stable because of high comparators and particular circumstances, which we have talked of. So our problem in terms of decline of actives historically has been emerging RSA. And I just wanted to partition the problem and focus it on emerging RSA. Within emerging ASEAN, if you look at our 3 biggest markets, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, as I mentioned, has grown actives at 10%. Malaysia Life has grown actives at 10% in H1 this year.

And coming to Indonesia and Philippines, where our agency transformation remains very much in flight. We will look to improve actives. There is no doubt about that. It is not a metric we don't care about, just to be super clear about that. But what we care also about is the quality of these actives. And I take you back to the point that we made on the PRUVenture recruits, right? If they are 6x the productivity of normal recruits, -- every one of those actives is 6x a normal active, right? And we are actually pivoting away from this model of mass recruitment, part-time agency in Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia to quality recruitment full-time agency. And therefore, our actives will grow, but more importantly, the quality of those actives will also grow as we move forward.

Thank you -- let's go to the next one, Alex. Time runs on.

Our next caller is Abid Hussain from Panmure Liberum Limited.

I'll try to be quick. So the first one is on the tax enforcement and the sort of the noise around that. Just wondering if you can share what proportion of the in-force business earnings or EV comes from the MCV PAR savings or other investment businesses -- other investment business that might be exposed to that tax enforcement and whether you've seen any lapse behavior changes in the recent weeks? That's the first one. And then the second one is just following on from the previous question on the agency. So obviously, the decline in the agency, the total 55,000 number, the decline is slowing.

But just are you trying to build a particular number that you're trying to get to on the 55000, -- it seems like you're pivoting away. So it might mean that we should see further declines. I just want to get my head around that bit. And just very, very quickly, final question on Eastspring. It looks like there's a sort of 2 bps revenue margin decline and the cost income ratio has gone up. Just wondering what's driving that? And where should we expect that to end up?

Abid, so let me first answer the agency question. I'll go to the tax enforcement and the in-force point to Ben and then Rajeev can pick up your cost-to-income ratio point. So on the agency, as we've said many times, we are pressing both levels. We are pressing the productivity level as well as the quality recruitment leading up to the active agents. We would like to see the active agents start to grow. There's no question about it.

And Naveen articulated some of the measures that we are enforcing specifically in the emerging ASEAN markets, moving away from a mass recruitment model to a more high-quality model. The reason we are doing that, as I said, is on 2 counts. One is the customers are demanding higher quality of advice. And the second is that we are pushing our propositions to more affluent and high net worth customers. So absolutely, we would like to grow the active agent base, but in tide and in sync with the productivity improvements over a period of time. I'm going to go to Ben for in-force. And then Rajeev, if you can pick it up on the cost-to-income ratio on ASI.

Yes, thanks for the question. So in terms of our Hong Kong business, about half of the relates to China Mainland visitors. Of that, 55% is health and protection products actually to give you a sense. Actually, of the remaining saving proportion, our savings products naturally have protection features embedded within them. So they're not pure savings or wealth products. No impact to lapses, persistency, retention ratios, phenomenally strong. And the majority of the payments, 95% plus for these products come from funds already made here in Hong Kong. So it's high-quality, sticky business. People aren't buying these products for some sort of tax reason.

Rajeev, do you want to pick up the...

Yeah, Thanks, Anil.

Yes, absolutely. Look, we had a very strong set of results in the first half, as you can see in the deck, strong inflows as well as very strong investment performance across our capabilities. The cost/income ratio decline is largely due to the IPAMC sell-down mechanics, and that's really what's driven the cost/income ratio to increase. But overall, our business mix has been very positive. Fee income ratios remain strong, and we're very pleased with the first half results.

Okay. Thank you, Rajeev.

Last one, Alex, and then we will draw a close.

Yes. Then our final caller is Thomas Wang from Goldman Sachs.

Maybe firstly, if I go back to Mainland China, just to clarify, in the announcement, I think you said the full year '26 NBP will be similar to full year '25. So that's on a CER basis, right? So which would roughly imply second half will be somewhere around 10% growth. Is that the right interpretation there?

The short answer is...

You had one more question. Go ahead. Go ahead, please.

Yes, sorry. And the second question is just on Hong Kong margin. So very, very good to see the margin expansion in the first half. Just wondering whether if you can give a little bit color on what's driving that expense savings? -- it -- because I don't think -- if it's product mix or what type of product or this premium term have lengthened? Just a little bit color on that would be great.

Thanks, Thomas. So on the China question, I guess the short answer is it is on a CER basis. When we speak to the guidance for the full year, which is a similar range as compared to what we witnessed in full year 2025. So you're right there. On HA margins, I'm going to go to Ben to provide you some additional color in terms of what's driving that.

Thomas, 2 things really on the margin side. One is improved mix. We've done well on the H&P side of things in Hong Kong, both with Mainland China visitors and the domestic segment actually. So that's given our margins a boost. On a number of policies basis, actually, we 57%, 58% of our product is H&P. So we're pleased with that. There was also a little bit of a shift in mix in terms of some of our savings and protection products as a result of repricing that gave us an additional boost there. So we're pleased with the margin uplift.

Okay. Thanks, Ben and Anil. So I'm going to pass back to Anil to quickly close up the call. Thank you for listening in. He's got some closing remarks.

Thanks, Patrick, and thanks, everyone, for this question. We are going to be on the road very shortly. So we would be getting an opportunity to further this conversation face-to-face as well. But I do want to call out the tremendous dedication and the hard work of our people who have been driving the transformation now for almost 4 years, and you can start to see some of the fruits of labor kind of coming through in our set of results.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to welcome Sir Douglas Flint, who is our new Chair and has recently chaired his first Board meeting. I, along with the management team, are looking forward to working with -- Sir Douglas and the rest of the Board as we continue to deliver on our financial objectives. Thank you very much, and we will be staying in touch as we get on the road. And hopefully, we'll get an opportunity to see you in person. Thank you.

Thank you, Alex. You can close the call now.

Thank you, everyone, for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.

Hello, I'm Anil Wadhwani, CEO of Prudential. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our half year 2026 results and update you on the progress we are making on the execution of our strategy.

The message I want to leave with you today is simple. Prudential is focused on the strategy we set out, delivering high-quality growth, generating strong capital and cash, and positioning the group for long-term success in the growth markets of Asia and Africa.

We remain disciplined in our execution, capturing the benefits of Prudential's diversified, multi-market and multichannel growth engines for all our stakeholders. And our first half reflects that. Growth was broad-based, margins expanded, underlying variances turned positive and earnings, capital and cash generation remained strong.

Importantly, this is quality growth. We are writing business that delivers attractive margins, strong cash conversion and resilient capital generation. And in doing so, we are creating long-term value for all our stakeholders. Our focus on long-term savings and protection is also closely aligned with the regulator's objective for the insurance sector.

At the same time, we are allocating capital with discipline. For example, investing for long-term growth in Malaysia and India, while continuing to increase returns to shareholders. In line with this, we expect to add $0.3 billion to our previously announced $1.2 billion 2026 share buyback program.

We are strengthening our competitive position in structurally growing markets across Asia and Africa. Our investments in distribution, propositions and technology position Prudential to capture the opportunity over time, creating a significant and durable growth runway. In summary, disciplined execution is delivering quality growth, stronger capital generation and greater shareholder value, while positioning Prudential for sustained long-term growth.

For the first half of 2026, new business profit was $1.4 billion, up 8%, or 10% excluding the Chinese Mainland. Adjusted operating profit after tax grew 17% per share. Gross operating free surplus generation grew 15% to $1.8 billion, and dividend per share grew 15%.

Capital generation remains strong, supporting $1 billion of returns to shareholders in the first half through dividends and the share buyback program. We remain firmly focused on the delivery of our full year 2026 guidance of double-digit growth in new business profit, gross OFSG and adjusted EPS together with double-digit dividend per share growth, and on achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

We are executing at pace across agency, bancassurance, health and customer. We are making steady progress on agency transformation with new business profit growth of 5% versus 4% for the full year of 2025. We recognize there is more work to be done, and we continue to implement our plans to improve the performance of this key distribution channel.

Bancassurance delivered another excellent performance, with new business profit up 13%, driven by deeper strategic partnerships and a broader partnership base. Excluding the Chinese Mainland, bancassurance grew 18%.

Health new business profit grew 15%, as we continue to build on our strengths in health to further extend into protection. We are reshaping and reimagining customer experiences through better technology, operations and AI.

This is translating into stronger outcomes and more scalable engagement. For example, our Customer Engagement Platform, now live in 10 markets, has helped drive more than $330 million of sales in the first half, and our customer retention rate is strong at 94%. These results are supported by our $1 billion strategic investment program, which was designed to build capabilities and modernize our infrastructure.

We have invested around $700 million since 2023, including $145 million in the first half of this year, continuing to build our distribution and customer capabilities and significantly strengthening our technology platform.

Our growth continues to be high quality, broad-based and balanced across channels and markets. Quality growth is a deliberate choice. We are focused on writing business that delivers attractive margins, strong profitability, persistency and higher cash conversion. We are seeing that come through in margin expansion, strong aggregate IRRs of more than 25% and fast paybacks.

We saw a broad-based contribution from our multi-market growth engine model. New business profit in Greater China grew 5%, and in ASEAN markets by 13%. APE sales were up 11% in India and were up 19% in Africa. Our asset manager, Eastspring, delivered operating profit growth of 20% on a like-for-like basis with funds under management up 5% to $291 billion.

Our distribution model remains well balanced with agency contributing 53% of first half new business profit, bancassurance 42% and other channels combined, including brokers, 5%. This balance matters because it gives us resiliency and flexibility. Our proprietary channels support higher-quality advice and deeper customer engagement, while serving customers through the channels that best meet their needs.

Turning now to the Chinese Mainland. Entering 2026, we had great momentum. APE grew 42% in the first quarter, with very strong momentum across both agency and bancassurance. Bancassurance, however, reduced in the second quarter following the implementation of more prescriptive expense regulations. Overall, the first half APE grew 21%. New business profit was down 4%, reflecting an accelerated shift towards participating products. The par mix increased from 35% to 76% of APE, which compressed new business profit margins.

Alongside this, we are working closely with our bancassurance partners as the channel transitions to the new expense regulations. We see these regulatory changes as supportive of a healthier, more sustainable industry over a period of time, even as they create some short-term transition impacts.

Our strategic relationship with CITIC Bank continues to deepen, and we expand our preferred bank network from 50 to more than 80 branches. At the same time, agency transformation continues to progress, with APE per active agent up 24% and MDRT qualifiers up 40%. The Chinese Mainland faces a high bancassurance comparator in the third quarter, which eases materially from September onwards. We expect full year new business profit to be in a similar range to that of 2025.

We continue to focus on the transformation of agency, restoring momentum in bancassurance and rebalancing product mix, with a clear focus on quality and capital efficiency. We have navigated previous periods of change effectively. While this creates some short-term transition impacts, it does not take away from the medium- to long-term potential, and we continue to see significant long-term growth potential in the Chinese Mainland market.

I really like the shape of our Hong Kong business. It is now better balanced between domestic and Chinese Mainland visitors and across agency and bancassurance. Our emphasis on generating quality growth translated into a 7 percentage point improvement in margins overall across both our proprietary channels of agency and bancassurance.

Overall new business profit grew 8%. Within that, bancassurance grew 48% as it captured wealth flows, and agency grew 4% against a strong comparator. Our domestic customer segment, which now generates around 50% of our new business profit, performed strongly, supported by demand from new residents. New business profit grew 22%. CMV new business profit was down 2% against an extraordinarily strong prior year comparator.

We remain highly optimistic about our Hong Kong business, given the strength of our multichannel model, the balance between domestic and CMV, and our emphasis on longer-pay savings, health and protection, and regular premium products. That is why we continue to target double-digit growth in Hong Kong for the full year, with the high July/August comparator base starting to ease from September onwards.

On the recent commentary around the reinforcement of existing rules for Chinese Mainland customers, in our assessment it is too early to tell what impact this might have on customers' behavior. In our conversations with customers and agents, the underlying demand drivers for insurance in Hong Kong remain very strong.

Customer retention rates remain very high, at around 99% across both domestic and CMV segments. This reflects the continued attractiveness of our propositions and is supported by our most recent customer survey, reinforcing our confidence in the structural growth prospects of our Hong Kong business.

ASEAN continues to perform well, with improving momentum across the region, driven by our underlying transformation. Overall, new business profit grew 13% in the first half and new business profit margins improved by 2 percentage points.

In Singapore, we delivered double-digit volume growth in both the first and the second quarters. We refreshed and broadened our health and protection offerings, adding new critical illness solutions. We saw 39% growth in investment-linked products, reflecting continued demand for wealth and savings solutions. Agency productivity improved, with new business profit per active agent up 9% and average case size up 23%.

In Malaysia, new business profit grew 46%, supported by propositions that help customers upgrade their health cover to better reflect their current needs. This was complemented by more specialized advice for affluent and high-net-worth customers, with new business profit per active agent up 29% and agency new business profit up 36%.

In Indonesia, the first half was challenging on account of the macro environment, including inflationary pressure, volatile equity markets and a depreciating currency, which weighed on the customer sentiment. Bancassurance performed very well, up 55%, supported by demand for U.S. dollar products and a higher mix of affluent customers, while agency was impacted by a strong prior year comparator and weaker customer sentiment.

In Thailand, product innovation and partnership execution supported strong growth. Our investment-linked offering, targeting affluent and upper-affluent customers, together with our partnership with TMBThanachart Bank, known as ttb, contributed to 41% APE growth in the first half.

The theme is consistent: growing our proprietary multichannel distribution model, while improving the quality and productivity of our agents, and leveraging product innovation to engage emerging affluent and affluent customers across the attractive markets of ASEAN.

India is one of Asia's significant long-term growth opportunities. Our strategy is to play a more active role and shape our growth trajectory through 2 complementary insurance platforms: life and health.

In life, our proposed acquisition of a 75% controlling stake in Bharti Life, subject to regulatory approval, would fundamentally reposition our platform. It moves us from passive minority participation to an active operating platform in a market with significant long-term potential. We are excited to be partnering with Bharti Airtel and 360 ONE. Together, Bharti Airtel's omnichannel reach and 360 ONE's affluent, high-net-worth and institutional relationships give us a stronger route to expand distribution, deepen customer access and deploy Prudential's capability more directly.

In health, we said we would launch our stand-alone business in the second half. We have now done so, and I am delighted that we have written our first policies earlier this month. Together, life and health give us the foundations to build a scalable franchise in India, aligned with the country's long-term ambition of Insurance for All by 2047.

Our focus is on building a high-quality business with a differentiated customer experience and regional expertise, and a strong position in health, where there is significant unmet demand to address. We are investing for the long term in a structurally attractive market, where we can apply our capabilities and create sustainable value.

Eastspring continues to be an important value creator and a key differentiator for Prudential. In the first half, operating profit after tax grew 20% on a like-for-like basis, while funds under management increased 5% to $291 billion. Performance was supported by $5.7 billion of positive net flows, diversified sources of funds and strong investment performance, with 74% of funds outperforming their 3-year benchmarks.

The business is highly cash generative, with a strong ROE and a disciplined cost-income ratio. Eastspring is well positioned to capture the rising wealth flows and growing retirement needs across Asia. Its scale, diversified funds under management, strong investment performance and deep local market expertise give it a clear platform for growth. Strategically, it's an important differentiator for Prudential, strengthening our life businesses through its investment capabilities and co-developed solutions while creating synergies between the 2 businesses.

Agency remains central to our quality growth strategy, contributing to 53% of first half new business profit. In the first half, agency new business profit grew 5%, margin improved by 2 percentage points, and new business profit per active agent increased 9%. Importantly, productivity is improving across both developed and Emerging ASEAN.

In developed markets, active agents were broadly stable and productivity increased 5%. In Emerging ASEAN, active agents were lower, but productivity increased 19%. That reinforces our view that the opportunity in agency is not simply about scale. It is about building a more professional, productive and active agency force.

Agent quality matters because customer needs are becoming more complex, particularly across affluent customers and in health and protection, requiring trusted high-quality advice. We remain the #2 MDRT agency force globally, and building that top-tier pipeline remains a key lever. The opportunity now is to continue lifting productivity across both developed markets and Emerging ASEAN, while improving activation and quality recruitment where the need is the greatest.

To accelerate productivity and quality recruitment, what I want to emphasize to you is that we are very focused on: increasing the proportion of agents who reach the top-producer cohort, particularly MDRT agents; enhancing productivity through AI and technology tools, such as PRUAction; strengthening our customer propositions in affluent high-net-worth, health and protection; transforming our recruitment program through initiatives such as PRUVenture, that support high-quality recruits at entry level; and focused training programs and upskilling of agents.

We know agency transformation is a multi-year journey, but our direction is clear. We are building a higher-quality, more professional and more productive agency force, with more agents moving up the productivity curve.

Bancassurance delivered an excellent performance, contributing 42% of first half new business profit. We are now on track to reach the target range of our 2027 bancassurance objective in 2026, 12 months early. New business profit was up 13%, with margins improving by 1 percentage point. This performance is driven by the strength of our exclusive strategic partnerships.

These relationships provide access to target customer segments, quality distribution and a platform to scale relevant propositions. We are deepening these partnerships through specialist models, stronger frontline execution and digital and AI-enabled tools.

At the same time, we are broadening our reach through nonexclusive partnerships and driving a pipeline of new digital banking partners. Bancassurance is an important distribution channel for us and positions us strongly to tap into the wealth flows across Asia.

One-Tech is the backbone of our digital investment program, moving us from fragmented digital stacks to a unified, scalable platform across the group. On this foundation, our business-led approach is embedding AI across customer journeys, helping customers access faster service, more relevant solutions and better support. Together, our modernized technology platform and AI-enabled capabilities are improving customer experiences, increasing straight-through processing, reducing processing times and lifting agent experience and productivity.

I'm excited by the value this is already unlocking. It is showing up in faster, simpler digital servicing for customers through PRUServices, stronger digital lead generation for agents, increased sales through our Customer Engagement Platform, and higher productivity through PRUAction, our agent performance management tool.

Our approach to capital allocation remains disciplined. We continue to invest in organic growth, strengthen the business, and return capital to our shareholders. This is underpinned by a strong balance sheet position and predictable capital generation. We remain committed to returning more than $7 billion of capital to shareholders between 2024 and 2027.

And now for 2026, we expect to increase our existing buyback program by approximately $0.3 billion. This takes expected shareholder returns for the year to more than $2 billion through ordinary dividends and other capital returns.

Likewise, we remain firmly focused on delivery of our full year 2026 guidance of double-digit growth in new business profit, adjusted EPS, gross OFSG and dividend per share. And on achieving our 2022 to 2027 objective of 15% to 20% CAGR new business profit and gross OFSG of above $4.4 billion in 2027.

Our confidence is supported by the long-term structural demand across our markets. Favorable demographics, rising wealth flows and low insurance penetration continue to drive demand for protection, health, savings and retirement solutions. With our trusted brand, multichannel distribution, strong market positions and asset management capabilities, Prudential is well positioned to capture these opportunities over time, giving us significant and durable long-term growth runway.

Let me close by reminding you of our journey. We are now close to 4 years in our 5-year strategy, and we have made strong progress. We have reset the business and built stronger capabilities through our billion-dollar investment program, investing in modernizing our technology, operations, AI and data, with a renewed focus on customer, distribution and health. Those investments are now translating into better customer experiences, more scalable distribution and stronger execution across agency, bancassurance and health.

At the same time, we have reshaped the portfolio and allocated capital with discipline, taking actions across India, Malaysia, Eastspring and Africa to strengthen the group's long-term growth profile. We have also increased returns to shareholders, supported by the strength of our capital generation and balance sheet.

In summary, Prudential is executing with discipline, delivering resilient, high-quality growth, strengthening its long-term capital position and increasing shareholder value. We remain firmly focused on the delivery of our 2026 guidance and achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

I will now hand over to Ben Bulmer, our CFO.

Thank you, Anil. Hello, I am Ben Bulmer, CFO of Prudential plc. I'm pleased to report that Prudential delivered another period of high-quality growth and increasing shareholder returns in the first half of 2026.

Our operational performance generated double-digit growth in 3 of our 4 key financial KPIs. Overall, we grew: new business profit or NBP, 8%; operating profit per share, 17%; capital generation, or gross OFSG, 15%; and the first interim dividend per share is up 15%, set as usual, at 1/3 of the prior year's full year dividend per share. We remain focused on disciplined and active capital allocation in line with the framework we set out last year.

We continue to invest in high-quality organic new business and in the capabilities required to transform the group and support sustainable growth. At the same time, we've taken actions to strengthen our strategic portfolio.

In India, we announced our agreement to acquire a 75% controlling stake in Bharti Life. This will move us from a passive to an active growth platform. We have also received approval to launch our stand-alone health business.

And in Malaysia, we increased our stake in our conventional life insurance business to 70%. In addition, during the first half of 2026, we returned over $1 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. We expect to increase our 2026 buyback of $1.2 billion by circa $0.3 billion, funded by our current capital market actions.

Our previous guidance for capital returns in 2027 is reconfirmed. We expect to return $1.3 billion in addition to the ordinary dividend, resulting in over $7 billion of returns to shareholders over the 2024 to 2027 period. We remain firmly focused on the delivery of our 2026 guidance of double-digit growth across our 4 financial KPIs and on achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

As usual, I will now run through our results in more detail, starting with value generation before turning to IFRS earnings and capital. Our diversified multi-market and multichannel platform continues to support high-quality value creation.

NBP generation reached $1.4 billion, up 8%. Excluding the Chinese Mainland, overall NBP growth would have been 10%. The 4% reduction in Chinese Mainland NBP reflected the combination of the margin impact from the increased share of participating business and the impact on sales volumes from the application of new industry-wide bancassurance expense rules.

We are working closely with our bank partners to restore momentum and rebalance product mix, including expanding our preferred branch network with CITIC and launching a range of new products. We expect full year NBP to be similar to 2025 levels.

By market, Malaysia was the standout performer, with NBP up 46%. We also saw good growth in Hong Kong, with higher margins and a strong domestic segment performance.

Thailand and India supported double-digit growth in our growth markets segment. From a channel perspective, the vast majority of our NBP generation is from proprietary distribution through our agency and bank partners. Over the first half, agency grew 5% whilst bancassurance continued to deliver strongly, with NBP up 13% overall or 18% outside of the Chinese Mainland.

We continue to focus on writing high-quality, capital-generative new business. The group's NBP margin improved by 2 percentage points year-on-year to 40%. We drove improvement in both agency and bancassurance margins despite reductions in the Chinese Mainland.

Margin progression was generated in Hong Kong and Malaysia through an improved health and protection mix. Hong Kong also benefited from further selective repricing actions. 33% of our NBP is sourced through health and protection products.

The majority of savings-related shareholder profits are derived from fee income within participating and unit-linked structures with limited direct market risk. Most importantly, we continue to focus on high-quality business that converts to cash, with attractive IRRs and short shareholder payback periods.

Embedded value operating profit increased by 11% to $2.5 billion, driven by NBP growth, a higher in-force return, and disciplined management of central costs. On a per share basis, embedded value operating EPS grew by 16%, benefiting from reduced noncontrolling interests in Malaysia and a lower average share count following our ongoing buyback.

On a headline basis and before allowing for capital distributions, the group's embedded value increased 6% over the 6-month period to $40.1 billion. On a per share basis, after allowing for capital distributions and excluding goodwill, this was $15.27, an increase of 5%.

Finally, on an annualized basis, our RoEV was 15%. We continue to believe that sustained high-quality growth and disciplined capital management will support a 2 to 3 percentage point improvement in RoEV over time.

I will now turn to our financial performance from an IFRS perspective. In our accounts, you will see that we've made a slight change to our presentation of our IFRS CSM and operating income, moving to what we call a shareholder view, removing certain policyholder items related to reinsurance that can distort the individual lines of the source of earnings analysis. This results in an increase in the insurance service result and a corresponding reduction in the net investment result.

Our guidance for CSM structural growth, growth in the net investment result, and growth in operating EPS are all unchanged. I will start, as usual, with the development of our CSM balance. This acts as a store of future profit, released over time to the income statement as insurance services are provided to customers.

Our focus on high-quality new business grew the CSM new business contribution to $1.4 billion, up 9%. Together with the normalized unwind and the release to the income statement, the underlying annualized CSM growth rate was 7%. This remains in line with our 6% to 9% guidance range, but below that reported in the prior period as a result of lower start-of-period interest rates mechanically reducing the rates of normalized unwind and a lower relative contribution from new business.

Economic and other variances were $0.3 billion. The release to the income statement was $1.4 billion. This equates to an annualized release rate of 10%, moderately below the first half of 2025, reflecting growth in longer-duration savings business over recent years. Overall, this, together with adverse FX translation, resulted in a closing CSM balance of $26.8 billion.

Turning to IFRS earnings, our insurance result was driven by the $1.4 billion CSM release, up 10%. This accounts for around 3 quarters of insurance operating profit. The net investment result was $0.5 billion, up 2%, in line with the guidance we provided in March. This reflects growth in life business surplus funds being dampened by strong remittances to group and asset derisking activities in the Chinese Mainland.

Experience variances, included within the other column of the left-hand chart, were negative $27 million compared with a positive $24 million in the first half of 2025. This mostly reflects increased investment in capabilities and start-up costs. As a result, the overall insurance result is up 5%.

Our IFRS income statement is summarized on the right-hand side of the slide. The headline asset management result is up 1%, with improved operating profit offset by the lower share of earnings from our Indian asset management operations, or AMC, following the IPO in December last year.

On a like-for-like basis, underlying asset management pre-tax earnings were up 19%. We have maintained our rigorous approach to controlling central expenditure. Corporate expenditure was broadly flat year-on-year and the level of restructuring costs reduced significantly. This positive operating leverage lifted growth in group operating profit before tax to 9%.

The effective tax rate was 16%, and benefiting from a reduced noncontrolling interest charge, shareholder operating profit after tax was up 13%. Allowing for the 4% reduction in the average share count, operating earnings per share grew by 17%.

Finally, turning to capital generation. We continue to make very good progress towards our 2027 objective of delivering in-force capital generation, or gross OFSG, of above $4.4 billion. Gross OFSG increased by 15% in the period, in line with the guidance provided in March. Underlying this was sustained growth in the expected transfer, up 16% to $1.6 billion, consistent with the $3.1 billion expected for the year as a whole. This increase reflects the benefit of high-quality new business growth over recent years.

Capability investment was $145 million. I continue to expect this to be between $300 million and $350 million for the full year, largely completing our program. Underlying operating variances are positive, and I will return to this shortly. Overall, gross OFSG increased to $1.8 billion, up 15%.

We then invested $0.4 billion in new business at attractive returns. Finally, adding the benefit of lower central and restructuring costs, group-level capital generation increased 41% to $1.2 billion.

We remain confident in achieving our 2027 gross OFSG objective of above $4.4 billion. We will meet this through growth in profitable new business, and completing in-train actions to return to long-term net positive variances. The now familiar chart on the left summarizes these key drivers.

As of the end of 2025, the capital emerging in 2027 from life business already written stood at $3 billion. To this, in 2026, we add profitable new business driving future capital generation in 2027 and beyond.

Over the first half, the new business addition to 2027 capital generation was up 42% on a year-on-year basis. This is largely driven by the mechanical effect of moving to the structurally higher policy year 1 contribution compared to policy year 2, alongside underlying volume growth. As a reminder, the 2025 full year new business addition was $0.5 billion, and I expect like-for-like growth this year to be broadly in line with growth in new business.

Returning to positive operating variances and assumption changes is the other key to the achievement of our 2027 gross OFSG objective. The return to underlying positive variances, at $32 million over the first half, for the first time since 2020, is an important milestone. This outcome reflects the continued benefit of actions to improve underwriting profitability within our health and protection business and the benefits of improving economies of scale, with total costs growing more slowly than revenues.

As I just mentioned, we expect to largely complete the investment in capability program this year. Given this, I'm confident we will deliver positive variances north of $200 million in 2027.

Business unit remittances to the group center are very strong. Over the first half, segment capital generation, net of investment in new business, was $1.4 billion. Remittances matched this. I continue to guide you to a remittance ratio of around 70%, noting that the timing of remittances is typically weighted to the first half of the year.

At a holding company level, this resulted in holding company free cash flow of $0.9 billion, the payment of the 2025 second interim dividend and our ongoing buyback program. Other corporate activities largely represent our increased holding in Malaysia. Overall, our central liquidity position remains very strong, with a closing balance of $3.7 billion.

The group's capital position remains robust. We benefit from strong and improving capital generation, very strong regulatory capital ratios, and low financial leverage. Our GWS regulatory capital ratio was 268% on a shareholder basis and 195% on a total company basis. And our free surplus ratio stood at 209% at the end of the period, ahead of our 175% to 200% operating range.

On a pro forma basis, allowing for the full return of the AMC IPO proceeds, this would be 200%. The development of the free surplus ratio over the first half reflects ongoing organic capital generation, less capital returns to shareholders, and the increased stake in Malaysia.

The progress evident in our first half financial performance and our strong capital position reflects our disciplined and active management approach to capital allocation and our focus on driving sustainable growth in value and capital generation. We continue to execute consistently across our framework by maintaining a very strong regulatory capital position, and investing in new business with IRRs in excess of 25% and payback periods of less than 4 years.

Our capital management program is now firmly established. So far this year, we have returned $0.8 billion of capital through our buyback program. We are also actively managing our strategic portfolio for sustained long-term growth.

Let me give you some further financial details on India, a key strategic market where we have pivoted from a passive position to a controlled growth platform. There are 2 separate but related transactions. First, our agreement to acquire a 75% stake in Bharti Life. And secondly, the prospective reduction in our current 22% holding in ICICI Prudential Life, or IPru, to around 10%. The initial cash consideration for Bharti Life is circa $370 million, with a potential additional payment of up to $74 million, dependent on fulfillment of certain conditions.

The transaction process is ongoing, with multiple regulatory approvals required. It's proceeding as expected, but will take some time to complete and hence, it has not yet been recognized in our accounts.

Regarding the second transaction, the reduction in our IPru stake. Part of the proceeds will be used to support future growth in the Prudential/Bharti platform, while the residual capital will contribute to our free surplus.

We will also continue to invest in growth in our stand-alone health business, now we have an operating license. This will be modest though, as we test, learn and grow alongside our partner, HCL.

Our performance over the first half has further demonstrated the quality of our franchise and the strength of a platform that is delivering high quality and compounding sustainable growth. We have leading positions in the highly attractive markets of Asia and Africa. We are generating attractive margins and are positioning the business to deliver double-digit performance for many years to come.

In summary, we remain focused on driving high-quality growth and increasing shareholder returns. We are executing against our strategic priorities at pace, sustaining bancassurance momentum, while building agency strength and quality. And we continue to enhance the quality of our new business to drive sustainable, efficient growth.

We are disciplined in the allocation of capital, investing in capability build, and in selective infill acquisitions that strengthen the future growth prospects of the group. We expect to increase our 2026 buyback of $1.2 billion by circa $0.3 billion, funded by our current capital market actions.

We remain firmly focused on the delivery of our 2026 guidance of double-digit growth in NBP, gross OFSG, operating EPS and DPS, and on achieving our 2027 financial objectives. Finally, we are well positioned in the long-term growth markets of Asia and Africa, and I remain excited by the opportunities ahead.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Prudential plc 2025 Full Year Results Q&A Audio Webcast Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Patrick Bowes. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, everyone. Welcome to Prudential plc's 2025 Results Analyst and Investor Call. Before I turn over to Anil Wadhwani, our CEO; and then Ben Bulmer, our CFO, a couple of housekeeping points.

A recording of today's call will be available from Tuesday next week. Our full results package is available on our website, and I'll refer you to the disclaimers and safe harbor wordings in these documents, and they also apply to this call. Anil and Ben will start the call with opening remarks followed by a Q&A. Also on the call today are Angel Ng, Dennis Tan, Rajeev Mittal and Naveen Tahilyani.

Now let me pass over to Anil, our CEO, to start us off.

Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I would like to begin by expressing my sincere thanks to our retiring Chair, Shriti Vadera. Shriti has successfully led the Board through a period of significant change for Prudential through economic and political turmoil and, of course, the challenges of the COVID period. She has been a strong supporter of the management team throughout our transformation journey. I'm very grateful for her leadership of the Board and her counsel to me, and I wish her all the very best in her future endeavors.

I'm also delighted to welcome sir Douglas Flint, as our incoming Chair, who will take up the role at the conclusion of the AGM. Douglas has experience of financial services and strong knowledge of the markets we operate in, and I am looking forward to working closely with him.

Turning to our 2025 full year results. I'm very pleased with the high-quality double-digit growth across our key financial metrics delivered in line with guidance and the increased returns for shareholders. This performance reflects the strength of our multi-market, multichannel business model and disciplined execution of our strategy with a continued focus on writing high-quality new business. Both new business profit and adjusted operating profit after tax per share grew 12%, while gross OFSG and dividend per share were both up 15%. Importantly, we consistently delivered double-digit growth in new business profit in every quarter of 2025. We also successfully completed the IPO of our Indian asset management company and increased our holding in our Malaysian conventional business to 70%. We continue to demonstrate disciplined capital management and a clear focus on shareholder value, and we now expect to return over $7 billion of capital to our shareholders between 2024 and 2027.

Turning to our strategic transformation. We are now three years into our five-year plan and have delivered 18% CAGR in new business profit growth from 2022 to 2025. We continue to strengthen our capabilities and operational execution to deliver consistent and ongoing quality new business and cash generation. First, we are executing with focus across our distribution, strengthening our agency channel while sustaining strong momentum in bancassurance. Agency is our largest channel and building and growing a high-quality professional and advisory-led agency force at prudential scale requires sustained commitment and disciplined execution. Productivity measured as new business profit per active agent improved by 15% in 2022, which I am very pleased with. This has been supported by continued strengthening of our $1 million roundtable or MDRT pipeline. At the same time, we see further opportunity to increase the number of active agents, specifically in emerging markets in ASEAN through quality recruitment, segment-specific propositions and supporting agent activity through technology enablement.

Turning to bancassurance. Prudential has a leading bancassurance franchise in Asia. The channel delivered an outstanding year with new business profit crossing $1 billion mark, representing around 95% of the lower end of its 2027 new business profit objective. Second, we continue to enhance the quality of new business by deepening customer engagement and improving experience across all touch points, unlocking synergies with our in-house manager Eastspring and building on our strengths in health to extend further into protection.

Third, we are driving efficient growth by modernizing our technology as well as embedding analytics and AI across agency health and operations to better support our agency force and deliver simpler, better experiences for customers. And finally, we have continued to make good progress in reducing core business-related variances, supporting the quality and sustainability of our capital generation. As a result, gross OFSG increased by 15%, marking an important inflection point on the path to meeting our 2027 OFSG objective.

While the macro environment remains volatile, our presence across Asia and Africa gives us access to significant structural growth opportunities. The strength and resilience of our multi-market, multichannel model allows us to deliver consistent, high-quality growth and generate sustainable shareholder returns. We will carry the momentum we set for ourselves in 2025 into 2026, and we firmly remain on track to achieve our 2027 financial objectives.

Now I'll hand it over to Ben, our CFO, to walk through our financial highlights.

Thanks, Anil, and hello, everyone. In 2025, we delivered on our guidance, double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs, demonstrating the strength of our diversified multichannel and multi-market business model. We intend to build on this momentum as we work towards and beyond our 2027 objective year. With higher NBP, further growth in our in-force and asset management results, flat central costs and the benefits of our strategic and capital actions, we increased our 2025 return on embedded value to 15%. We continue to see scope to improve this as we progress towards our 2027 financial objective, driven by further NBP growth, a return to positive operating variances and ongoing disciplined capital management. We also reached the inflection points in our capital generation trajectory with gross OFSG up 15% year-on-year, whilst our net OFSG is up 22%. The group's capital position remains highly robust. Our free surplus ratio ended the year at 221% or 204%, excluding the IPO net proceeds, broadly consistent with the 175% to 200% normal operating range we've set out. We were pleased that our financial strength and flexibility was recognized by S&P with its upgrade of our financial strength rating to AA.

We updated our capital allocation framework in August last year. We gave guidance of greater than 10% dividend per share growth each year from 2025 to 2027. The 2025 dividend per share increased 15%. We also announced that shareholders will benefit from additional capital returns over and above the ordinary dividend, starting with $500 million this year and a further return of $600 million expected in 2027. This framework is intended to be enduring, and we thus intend for further additional capital returns in 2028 and beyond. Capital above our established 175% to 200% operating range will be assessed regularly and if deemed excess return to shareholders.

We plan to return all of the $1.4 billion net proceeds from the IPO process to shareholders to be split half this year, half next year. In January, we launched a $1.2 billion buyback to be completed by the end of 2026 and expect to return a further $1.3 billion in 2027. So we're delivering growth in value and what we believe is a highly attractive returns proposition.

We remain focused on growing quality new business with strong underlying capital generation. New business profit grew 12% and the addition to 2027 capital emergence increased by 16%. The NBP margin expanded 2 percentage points to 42%. Further improvements in our agency performance and increasing the proportion of health and protection business continue to provide opportunities to improve margins over the medium term. The management of our in-force book continues to improve, reflecting actions taken in strengthening our health claims management.

We are also benefiting from economies of scale with total costs growing more slowly than revenues. This positive leverage will allow us to continue to invest in our business on a normal course basis. We intend, as we've said, to largely complete our capability investment program in 2026 with an investment of between $300 million and $350 million, and we are very confident of returning to positive variances by 2027.

In summary, we delivered improving financial performance in 2025 with double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs, consistent with our guidance. The consistency of our operating performance also improved. And while there's work to do, we were pleased to deliver double-digit NBP growth in every quarter of 2025. For 2026, we are again guiding to double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs, and we remain very confident in achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

With that, I'll pass back to Patrick.

Thank you, Ben and Anil. I'll now hand over to our conference call operator, Jake, who will provide instructions and then open the lines for questions. Please remember to give your name and organization you represent when asking a question, and you're also welcome to submit your questions online. So over to you, Jake.

[Operator Instructions] Our first caller is Thomas Wang from Goldman Sachs.

It's Thomas here from Goldman Sachs. If I can kind of start with a kind of broad question on growth. There's a few kind of surprises on this set of number. I think China, definitely, I remember in the first half, our guidance was kind of high single-digit MBP growth, but we end up with something close to 30%. Very strong in second half. I just wondering what you see in terms of outlook for 2026? Do you think that we can maintain this momentum into 2026? And secondly, maybe on Hong Kong, slightly slower growth in the second half, maybe not surprising, but I just want to get your thoughts on '26 momentum? And how do you see kind of the base effect? Is that -- how challenging that is, and how confident we are getting back kind of to a double-digit or potential mid-teen growth in Hong Kong? And if I can just -- sort of related to this, I think the '25 growth was mainly driven by bancassurance. Agency channel was just about 4%. I think that's probably tied to Hong Kong as well. Just wondering, can you give a little bit more color on what's kind of initiative to drive that agency growth in 2026?

Thanks, Thomas, for those questions. I guess there are three questions. So just bear with me because I guess it's going to be a slightly long answer as I try to address each one of them. So firstly, let me start with the broader outlook. So we clearly were pleased with the 2025 outcomes. I thought it was a landmark year for Prudential. Our new business profit grew at 12%. Importantly, it was an inflection point for OFSG that grew at 15%. And our transformation execution is getting sharper as well as clearly, our model is underpinned by multi-market and multichannel. And that gives us the confidence to take the momentum that we set for ourselves in 2025 to 2026.

As Ben mentioned in his opening comments that we are guiding to delivering double-digit growth across our financial metrics for 2026 as well. Now specifically coming to China, clearly pleased with the 27% growth on new business profit that we delivered in Mainland China, specifically pleased with the improved trajectory and momentum that we saw in the second half of last year, where both bancassurance and importantly, agency delivered strong double-digit growth.

At the same time, as you know Thomas, we have been working very hard to retooling our business and driving quality growth underpinned with strong risk discipline processes. And you're starting to now see the evidence of that growth come through. We were also delighted with the fact that our par mix is touched to 40%. It was close to 15% in the prior year. And again, that's a step in the right direction and again, underpins as to how we are managing quality growth with strong risk discipline.

I'm not going to give you a market-specific guidance. As I said, the guidance overall is double digit. And clearly, China is going to play a key part in helping us drive that double-digit performance in 2026. Let me shift gears and talk a little bit about Hong Kong. So firstly, just stepping back, I really like the shape of our Hong Kong business. We grew both Mainland Chinese visitor segment and domestic segment. And both our channels, bancassurance and agency grew too. Our focus at all times has been quality, which was illustrated by the 2 percentage points improvement in margin. And our new business profit for full year 2025 grew by 12%. Now as you pointed out, second half was a bit of an unusual period for us in Hong Kong, given the fact that we were embracing a slew of regulatory changes, specifically targeted towards the broker channel.

So for example, the referral fee cap, the spreading of commission, also the changes that came through on illustration [ cap ] led to the growth coming in, in short-term products largely through the broker channel. Now for us, the focus has been quality new business that generates cash at an accelerated pace. So let me give you a couple of proof points on that. One, 95% of our business in Hong Kong were in tenures greater than five years as opposed to an industry average of approximately 40%. We have leadership in Hong Kong on the critical illness business. And in quarter 3 of last year, we established leading position on the health business.

Importantly, our Hong Kong renewal premium growth was 15% year-on-year. Our primary channels continue to be agency as well as bancassurance for obvious reasons because we have a greater influence both on customer experience as well as a higher degree of influence on product mix. And importantly, our agency growth in terms of new recruitment was again greater than 5,000 with our active agent growth in Hong Kong, growing at 12% for 2025. We continue to see demand both across domestic as well as Mainland Chinese visitor segment, be it in legacy planning products, multicurrency products as well as health and protection. And a combination of these factors gives us the confidence that we will grow our agency as well as our Hong Kong business in 2026.

Now to your third question on -- specifically on agency. So clearly, we are not as pleased with the agency growth as we are with bancassurance. Remember, we are a multichannel, multi-market growth engine model. Bancassurance has done exceedingly well for us. Agency clearly came in below expectation.

Now let me step back and just explain and give you a little bit of color in terms of what's going on in our agency channel. So if you look at our 3-year growth between '22 to '25, we have delivered a growth of 18% CAGR over the last three years. This has been predicated on the back of a 19% growth in agency and a 12% growth in bancassurance. And as I said, I like the complementing nature of agency and bancassurance. There have been years where agency has performed better than bancassurance, and there have been years where bancassurance has performed better than agency.

Agency transformation is our #1 priority. And I'll have Naveen, who heads agency as well as some of our ASEAN markets give you a little bit of color. But let me preface it with a few points. So firstly, there are two specific measures that we are pressing forward on agency. First is productivity, as is measured by new business profit per active agent, and I'm very pleased with the growth that we witnessed last year. It was up 15%. It helped us offset the decline of 11% on active agents.

Our active agents was largely impacted by the emerging ASEAN markets of Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. And if you go under the hood and look at what the driver of that was, it was largely the new recruitment in these four markets. I'm going to stop there, and I'm going to have Naveen articulate as to what are we doing about it specifically and illustrate that with a specific example in terms of how we are implementing some of the steps to change the momentum on agency. Naveen?

Thank you, Anil. So first and foremost, over the last few months, as I've had a chance to spend time with our top agents and leaders on the ground, I'm very convinced that we have some very high-quality top-notch professionals working with us and our agency quality is right up there in these markets.

Second, when I look at the different initiatives in our agency strategy, I'm fully aligned, and I think we cover all the bases in terms of both the aspects that Anil mentioned, improving the top-tier productivity as well as looking to enhance the activation and recruitment. Now the top-tier productivity initiative is already working well. Anil already shared the data points over there. As far as enhancing activation through quality recruitment, we are focused on creating professional recruitment schemes, which work on the right capability building for the leaders as well as agents, supporting them with the right technology and the right propositions.

One such example is PRUVentures in Malaysia, where this scheme has scaled up in the second half of last year. And for all of last year, this scheme accounted for about 1/4 of our incoming class of recruits in Malaysia. And what is very interesting to see and very encouraging to see is the fact that the retention as well as the productivity of this incoming class through PRUVentures is significantly higher than those coming through other schemes. So for example, particularly on productivity, the productivity of these agents is 6x that of the non-PRUVenture recruits. So our focus right now is to take such professional recruitment schemes with discipline to other markets and make sure we can use that to scale up our recruitment as well as our activation. So that's what we are doing. Anil, back to you with that.

Thanks, Naveen. So just in closing, Thomas, building and scaling our high-quality professional agency force in Asia and that also of a size of Prudential does require consistent commitment and focus on execution. And we are absolutely confident and focused on driving the transformation on agency.

Our next caller is Farooq Hanif from JPMorgan.

Just on the point of agency, can you just explain why you don't just use PRUVentures entirely for recruitment? And then can you also talk about the technology arms race in terms of the digital tools you're giving your agents? My sense was that -- and I might be wrong, but you were kind of behind, you've come along, you've invested.

Do you feel like you're in line or better than your top competitors when it comes to that kind of technology? Second question is understanding kind of the remittances. So the capital position of your subs seems strong. You've remitted quite a lot of capital. Can you just talk about why you've remitted so much capital to the holding given your previous comments that you prefer to keep this as much capital in the subs to earn a higher return? And what's the outlook here? And how will that impact your investment margin going forward? And my last question is will underlying variances, so that's obviously excluding the capability investment. Will they reach an inflection point in 2026? I mean they may turn positive or slightly positive, but what can we model in for that? And how does that differ between sort of free surplus and IFRS?

Thanks, Farooq, and thanks for this question. So let me first take the PRUVenture one, and I'll again have Naveen provide you some greater insights and greater color. And then I will go to Ben on the remittances and the variances question. So firstly, we have seen great success on PRUVenture, for example, in a market like Hong Kong. And the success is what really drove us to now rolling that out in some of the other markets. And again, Naveen has illustrated in terms of the early impact of that witnessed in Malaysia. And our ambition now is to kind of roll that out at a brisk pace across the different markets of ASEAN. But I'm going to stop there and ask Naveen to provide you a greater color both on the extension of PRUVenture as well as the technology enablement.

Okay. So thanks, Anil, and Farooq, thanks for the question. So PRUVentures, as I said, is a scheme which is about encouraging professional recruitment, both at the leader level as well as at the agent level. To build on the example that Anil already shared of Hong Kong, where this scheme has kind of scaled up over the last year, the increase in number of PRUVenture recruits was 43% and 2/5 of the incoming class was actually from PRUVentures. So Hong Kong is an example of a market where we have successfully scaled up PRUVentures.

And of course, we'll continue with these efforts in this particular market. I already illustrated Malaysia, which scaled up in the second half of last year, and we will have the impact of PRUVentures through all of this year in Malaysia. And exactly, as you mentioned, our effort right now is with some customization to take this scheme to the other emerging markets of ASEAN, particularly Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, where, as Anil said, we've been kind of looking to improve our recruitment and hence, our activation.

Now each one of these markets requires a little bit of customization, a little bit of change to the scheme, and we have kind of -- we have done that, and we are looking to implement that with discipline as we move forward. So that's on PRUVentures and professional recruitment.

On technology, we think of technology and agency in two loops. One loop is how do we improve the agent productivity as they think about interaction with their customers. So this is about lead management, prospecting, sales, service and claims management. And the second one is what -- how does an agent and a leader improve their own productivity in terms of realizing what their compensation is, what their action should be, and how do they think about improving their income. Those are the two loops in which we think about technology and agency.

My assessment of where we are in today in terms of that technology capability, we are right up there with the best in the market. So we have a proprietary platform called PruForce. You may have heard of this name before, which is now rolled out to all the markets, and we are looking to continuously enhance the capabilities in PruForce. But as of today, we are pretty good right up there on both of these aspects. What we are doing now is actually injecting a healthy dose of AI into this in a very practical targeted manner on both of these value loops, the customer value loop as well as the agent and the leader value loop.

An example of that, which I want to share is PruAction, which was pioneered in Singapore last year. And this was an AI-enabled performance management system for our agents and leaders to improve their productivity. As we went through this, we saw an increase in productivity of about 15%, which is quite strong. And we are now looking to take PruAction to all the markets that we have as far as agency is concerned. So that's where the technology focus is, and we'll continue to get better and improve as we move forward.

Thanks, Naveen. Now moving to Ben for the next two questions on remittances and the variances.

Yes. Thanks, Anil. Hi, Farooq. So on remittances, look, I continue to guide you to the 70% ratio in terms of the remittance rate for LBU net surplus generation. You're right, I elected to bring up some stock this year from the Hong Kong business. I do like having a balance of surplus in both centrally and in the businesses.

I said that before, we like to have agility locally. We have stakeholders to manage. That said, I'm not going to leave excess capital in businesses. I will bring that up to center. You're right, it did have a temporal impact on the net investment return in the IFRS result, along with the effects of some China derisking that we did.

And similarly, when you think about earnings, we have a lower sort of central net investment return number as a result of completing that $2 billion buyback from stock. In terms of the underlying variances, I'm pleased with the progress we're making. I think they materially improved year-on-year. And now really, if you remove the investment in capabilities, fairly close to being neutral. I'm very confident that we're going to return to those historic pre-COVID norms of positive operating variances within our objective period. And of course, we're a bigger business now than we were. We're very much focused on continuing to drive underwriting profitability. I think you've seen evidence of that and investing in our capabilities to drive growth and scale.

So ultimately, this is about operating leverage. And I'm pleased to see renewal premiums up double digit once again last year. We will continue to focus on cost containment to also improve that operating leverage, and that gives us the headroom to then continue to reinvest in the business on a business-as-usual basis going forward. I think you asked about differences between IFRS and TEV. There are some differences in geography, of course, between sort of VFA and GMM. The key thing to bear in mind there is that about 2/3 of our investment in capabilities are sat in the CSM unlocking number as opposed to that variance line. So yes, very confident we're going to continue to drive very strong variance performance.

Our next caller is Michael Chang from CGI.

It's Michael Chang here. Can I just check you can hear me?

We can hear you, Michael, loud and clear.

Okay. Yes, I really like the results, especially in relation to the Mainland China business. I think it's very impressive what the business has done, especially on the bancassurance front. So can I just get some more clarity? I understand that Citi has been a great partner as well as SEB. I think they contribute, if I'm not wrong, 2/3 of the APE. It seems that a lot of investors within the China space right now for the insurers, they are quite focused on this wave of maturing time deposits, which the bancassurance is best placed to capture.

So could I maybe get some color on any initiatives you have in terms of further deepening the relationship with CITIC in terms of maybe more branches as well as with Standard Chartered, coupled with any new initiatives in terms of new bancassurance partners? So that's the first one. And I think the second one is primarily in relation to the Asia market, I think one of the key structural themes post the pandemic -- well, sorry, even more so post the pandemic has been the very strong demand for wealth management solutions. In the case of the insurers, there are some, some of your peers who are making the point that maybe third-party channels is a good way to tap this opportunity. Now I know that Prudential is extremely strong in the agent channel and the bancassurance channel. So maybe you can just shed your light -- shed some light on your thoughts about using third-party channels to tap this wealth management opportunity, and why have you chosen to actually be relatively underweight versus your peers on this front?

Thanks, Michael. So let me start with China, and I'll go to Angel, who can probably give you a little bit more color on how we are thinking about the China growth and specifically to your point on deposits and the deposits maturity because you're right in pointing out that the China or the Chinese economy continues to be a very high savings economy, which, in many ways, given the low interest rate environment speaks to some of the solutions that we can bring to our customers. But I do want to start by saying that clearly, bancassurance has been a key driver of growth for us in China.

And it's heartening to see that we are now seeing a significant traction from CITIC Bank, and this is on account of the focus that Angel has brought in terms of ensuring that there is a segment of branches that are exclusively dedicated to selling CITIC Prudential life insurance policies. And that has made a dramatic difference in terms of CITIC's contribution to the overall bancassurance sales and the overall sales in China Mainland as compared to some of the previous years.

I think interesting to note, our margins on bancassurance are pretty healthy in China. And that again underscores the point that I made earlier to Thomas' question that, that is underpinned by the focus on quality, and how we would like to grow our new business profit in China. But I'm going to stop there and turn to Angel to specifically answer your time deposit question.

Thank you, Anil, and thank you for the questions, Michael. You are correct that Standard Chartered and CITIC both are our strategic bank partner, which are also delivering very good growth rate in 2025. Especially on your questions on CITIC Bank, we've launched the preferred branch model last year, with the first 50 branches basically is to aim for increasing our wallet share in those branches by giving them dedicated resources like insurance specialists to help the relationship managers to sell the products better.

So that yields very good results. And into 2026, we are aiming to increase the number from 50 to 100. So basically doubling the number of preferred branch under this model. The other one that we are working on is to increase and diversify our partnership in the bancassurance channel. We are going to focus to work on the top 10 partners in the bancassurance channel so that we can also repeat what we have turned out in the CITIC preferred branch model business. The last point that I want to talk about is your point on deposit maturity.

We are working very closely with all of our bank partners to capture these opportunities. Especially, we are going into a deeper collaboration with the private bank segments of our bank partners with greater engagement with the high net worth customer, which will increase our average ticket size. So I think these will give us a very solid plan going into 2026 to deliver our business target. Getting back to you, Anil.

Thanks, Angel. So Michael, going on to your next question on wealth management brokers and are we planning to do more there? The short answer is yes. While our primary channels continue to be agency and bancassurance for reasons that I articulated earlier, absolutely

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we are engaged on a very active basis, where we are seeing the greater kind of attraction for wealth management offering. But you will see more innovative solutions coming from us in that space. Mind you, one of our key differentiators, and I want to bring this point back is the complementing nature of bancassurance to agency. Bancassurance has done well because it continues to attract a certain level of flows from emerging affluent customers as well as high net worth customers. And that continues to be a great source for us to engage customers through our preferred or strategic bank relationship partners. Some of them, as Angel mentioned, are not only limited to China, but to the broader Asia and Africa landscape.

Our next caller is Andrew Crean from Autonomous Research.

Three sort of numbers-based questions. Firstly, you've given on bancassurance that you're 95% of the way to your -- the lower end of your target. Could you give the same percentage for agency? Secondly, agency active numbers at 57,000, you were targeting 80,000 to 90,000 by 2027. Where do you actually think you're going to land on that? And then thirdly, you talked about improving new business profit margins in the medium term from the current 42%. Could you be a bit more specific as to what medium term is, and where 42% can go to?

Thanks for those questions, Andrew. So you're right that bancassurance is at 95%. So that allows us a significant level of headroom close to two years in advance of the goal or the objective that we had set for bancassurance. Agency on that same count is roughly about close to 2/3 of the objective that we had set for agency. And that also kind of leans in to your second question, which is what are we doing about active agents, and Naveen was trying to articulate that.

And the way we are thinking about this, Andrew, is that we are going to push both the productivity as well as active agents, right? And I don't have a kind of specific kind of mathematical formula for what I would like to kind of get to. As far as either through productivity or through active agents or a combination of that, we still kind of hit the agency, agency number. And that could be different as compared to what we had conceived three years back, but I'm still confident that we will press on both the levers of productivity and active agents to get to the agency outcome that we had set for ourselves for 2027. To your question on NBP margin, I'm going to go to Ben for him to elaborate.

Yes. Thanks, Anil. Hi, Andrew. So look, I do think we have opportunity to continue to improve margins. I'm pleased with the performance, not just last year, but the year before as well. And that opportunity is fourfold really. Firstly, improving our health and protection product contribution in the mix. Secondly, accelerating agency growth, and you've heard that's the #1 transformation priority.

Thirdly, really, it's back to this point on operating leverage and building scale, and we're seeing that scale coming back. And then finally, we'll continue to look to actively reprice propositions, and you've seen activity there. In terms of why medium term, maybe a bit of specific guidance. We talked in China about driving a greater proportion of par business. Our margins in China have come down 3 points year-on-year in 2025. I expect a further reduction in 2026 as we drive a higher proportion of participating business. Stepping back, though, I do think we have -- continue to have ample opportunity to drive overall group margin.

Our next caller is William Hawkins from KBW.

Could you talk a bit more about some of the non-Chinese markets, please, Anil, your outlook for Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia? I mean are these proportionate contributors to double-digit growth or tailwinds or headwinds? And then secondly, please, the -- there's a 20% increase in required capital for the surplus ratio, I think. That feels sort of slightly outsized to your guidance that it should grow roughly in line with new business profit over time. So I've got in mind that it should be more like a sort of slightly north of 10% growth in the future. So can you explain if I'm right, why was there an outsized growth in required capital? And what's the outlook for that metric in the surplus ratio? I'll leave it at that.

Thanks, Will. So let me start with Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Yes. So yes, we obviously are looking for all the ASEAN markets to contribute. On Singapore, let me give you some texture. Clearly, very strong momentum on sales in the second half of last year. The sales grew by 19%. The challenge that we had in Singapore was more around product mix, which was skewed more towards savings and wealth as well as the demand coming from the government-sponsored medical plan, which is known as Shield, got calibrated because of changes in the co-payment rules.

On account of the steps that we are taking as well as the strength that we have in Singapore, both in terms of the 1.5 million customer relationships as well as the distinct strengths across bancassurance, tied agency and financial advisory channel, we believe that we can grow Singapore to high single digit on new business profit, if not early double digit. Indonesia, very pleased, 11% growth on new business profit.

And mind you, this is the second year that we've been able to deliver new business profit growth in Indonesia, which is what we had struggled to do that in the prior years running up to COVID and even coming out of COVID. So pleased with that. And it also tells you that we are in a much better position to be able to address some of the challenges on medical inflation as well as we distinctly see an opportunity to Naveen's point, in terms of improving our agency momentum.

So I believe that Indonesia will continue to be double-digit growth. Malaysia, again, was a struggle for us in the first half of last year, but did exceedingly well in the second half of last year. And again, it talks to some of the steps that we took on PRUVentures, and how we are retooling our agency. We are seeing that momentum carry forward into 2026 and remain optimistic that Malaysia will come back to deliver double-digit growth as opposed to the 5% new business profit growth it delivered in 2025. I'm going to go to Ben on your second question.

Yes. Thanks, Anil. Hi, Will. So the simple answer is it was down to nonoperating effects. We had very strong equity market performance in a number of our markets, where the local regulatory basis uses economic capital models and also has, as it happens, countercyclical equity risk adjustments. So in periods where you have very strong equity performance, the risk adjustment increases, required capital grows. Of course, your available surplus also grows. But when we look at the free surplus ratio, we take that required capital number over.

But of course, we truncate available surplus of what's actually fungible. So really, it was down to outsized equity performance in a few markets. Going forward, when you think about modeling required capital, I would guide you again to low double-digit growth rates of 12%, 13% in mind.

Our next caller is Kailesh Mistry from Deutsche Bank.

A few questions from me. On numbers, just on China CPL, could you just give us the core and comprehensive solvency ratio post the bond in January? Second one, there's something about a slightly lower CSM release rate in 2026. How much does that go down? Does it go down below 9%, or does it stay above? Or alternatively, you can give us the release rates for Indonesia and China, which seems to be driving that? And then thirdly, just on agency, could you just give a little bit more color about this comment in the statement about revamping agency compensation? Are you changing the incentives, or is it purely about increasing commissions to make it more attractive, et cetera, et cetera?

So I'm going to go quickly to Ben for the first two and then Naveen for the agency question.

Hi, Kailesh. So if you pro forma for that recent perpetual debt issuance, the business is operating at 3x and 2.3x regulatory minimum levels. So more specifically, core is at 150% comprehensive around 234%. As I've mentioned before, we've increased our sources of local financing. And later in the first half of this year, the business will recapture some existing sub debt and replace that with perpetual debt, and that will give a further solvency uplift. In terms of your question on IFRS. Actually, at a group level, the release rate is going to be marginally lower. So in the sort of late 9.4s rather than 9.5s.

Okay. Thank you, Ben. And we're over to Naveen.

So on the question on agency compensation, this is a structured initiative as a core pillar of our agency transformation to encourage the two behaviors that Anil already mentioned. One was improving top-tier productivity and the second one was to enhance quality recruitment.

So what we have done through last year and this year so far is actually piloted this in a number of markets and put these structural initiatives now in place. In fact, we had pretested this with a large number of our agents and leaders. In the pretesting, it was very well received. And now in the markets where we have actually rolled it out, it's also very well received and the implementation has been quite smooth. This is targeted to both agents as well as their leaders who actually recruit them. And as I said earlier, it's totally aligned to our transformation objectives.

Our next caller is Changazi from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Just very briefly on this PRUVenture, which sounds very interesting. In terms of what happened in Hong Kong, 2/5 of recruitment, new recruitment came from PRUVenture. So what was the number of agents in '24 and '25 in Hong Kong? And on the OFSG, just two questions. We have the usual slide where we're looking for 2026 new business profit contributing plus $0.5 billion to 2027 OFSG.

Can I just -- is that assuming some sort of mix shift, which accelerates conversion of OFSG or is just normal new business profit growth? And the last point on the operating variance, I know Ben mentioned positive returning to historic positive levels previously, and you're a bigger company. Previously, you used to give that chart where it was 0.9% of opening EV from 2011 to H1 '24. In '24, it was 1.4% of opening EV. How -- is there any reason not to assume it will be 8% of opening EV, and where should we be landing on that percentage?

Thanks for the question. Let me give it to Naveen to the Hong Kong PRUVenture, and then we'll go to Ben for the two questions on financials.

Sure. So on Hong Kong PRUVentures, as I said, PRUVentures is fundamentally a high-quality professional recruitment scheme in Hong Kong. Very pleased to share that last year, which is in '25 compared to '24, PRUVentures scaled up by 43% and 40% of the incoming class of recruits was through PRUVentures. So that's where we are on Hong Kong, and I already covered Malaysia. And as I said, we will now be looking to roll this out with the right customizations to other markets.

Thanks, Naveen. Let's go to Ben on these two financials.

So on the OFSG production -- projection slide, I think you're referring to Slide 43 on the top right, a, the new business additions. So the -- that is the normal profit signature that you're seeing there. We design our products to be very capital efficient. It's about capital velocity for us. So we're writing business with a fast monetization profile and a short payback period.

Put simply, the cost of writing the business, whether that's distribution, underwriting, admin, capital requirements or so on, comes through in year 1. And then we try to recoup some of those costs through the collection of second year premiums to match revenue to costs closely as possible. So that's why you have a jump there in the release. And thereafter, it's more of a levelized pattern. I'll be brief on variances. You should have in mind north of $200 million in 2027. As I said, we're now a bigger business. We're very much focused on driving scale and cost containment.

Okay. Thanks, Ben. Conscious time runs on. Dominic, do you want to go next? Jay, give you to Dominic, please?

Our next caller is Dominic O'Mahony from BNP Paribas Exane.

I will try to be quick. Three, if that's okay. One is just on your IRRs, I think greater than [ 25% ] is a great number. How does that compare between banker and agency? My guess is that banker is lower, but tell me if that's wrong. The second question is just on the shape of new business surplus emergence, really following up on Farooq's question. Are you expecting any further change in the shape? It's accelerated in '25. Should we expect further acceleration in the shape of emergence beyond this? And then a last question on variances. Very clear, thank you, Ben, for the explicit guidance on the variances in '27.

If you're still -- if you're already growing, frankly, at a very decent clip, I would have thought that you would have already got to the stage where you're getting the benefit of that operating leverage coming through in the variances, which says to me there must be some relatively substantial negatives coming through still in '25, offsetting that to get to your $45 million negative. What are these? What are the sorts of things that are acting against that?

Ben, do you want to take that?

Yes. Hi, Dom. Look, I'll start -- I'll do it in reverse order, if that's okay. In terms of variances without repeating my earlier comments, the sort of residual negative you're now seeing is a mixture of scale coming back, but we continue to, if you like, incubate some of our smaller businesses. So Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Africa, for example. Scale is building nicely as renewal premiums compound. We have further actions in train to drive cost containment, just to give you a little bit of color.

So it's not simply about revenue compounding. We are focused on changing or structural changes in the cost base through automation, digitization, tech convergence, investing in processes, using centers of scale and excellence all with the aim of driving lower net costs going forward. So we'll -- we hope to be able to deploy that leverage into reinvestment in the business.

Cash profile, I'm pleased with all the improvements we made over the last few years. I know you're very aware of those as a result of repricing, so I won't repeat them here. I think we do have opportunities to continue to improve the business. This is -- and we'll look for that from a repricing perspective, but mix, more health and protection, again, accelerating agency will all help with that cash profile.

To be very clear, I'm not reliant on any change in business profile to get to 2027. You shouldn't read that being inferred into these numbers. And that's because we put the hard yards in repricing savings products a number of years back. So we're not reliant on that, comfortable with the 2027 target.

On your IRRs, actually, on -- in terms of the products sold, very similar products sold on. So at a product level, the IRRs by channel are actually pretty consistent. So differences in the sort of channel IRRs overall are more a factor of mix. And as I think you know, the agency channel tends to sell a greater proportion of health and protection. That said, one of the things that has improved our margins and our cash profiles is the success we've had driving health and protection through the bancassurance channel, improving our margins consistently year-on-year. So very pleased with that.

Thank you, Ben, for that concise answer. We've got a chance for a very last question from Nasib at UBS. Jake, you let him through. We'll take a few offline. I can see a few on the list. We'll come back to them from the IR team. But Nasib, do you want to go ahead?

Our next caller is Nasib Ahmed from UBS.

Just two questions from me. Firstly, on Hong Kong market share, I was looking at Hong Kong Association data. 2023, you had about 30% market share. I'm looking at agency and now 2025, you're less than 25%. That's as a percentage of APE. So can you give more color on are you going to grow back to greater market share in Hong Kong in dollar amounts?

And then the second one is on numbers. Ben, you said investment spend is going to be broadly done by 2026. I think if you kind of add up the numbers, you're maybe left with $100 million, $150 million of the $1 billion. Are you expecting to spend less than $1 billion in '27? Is it kind of closer to 0 or 50?

Thanks for those questions, Nasib. So on Hong Kong market share, again, I want to kind of go back to the emphasis on quality growth, right? And that is where our focus has been. Within that, those parameters, yes, we absolutely would like to grow our market share, and we do have plans to do that. But at all times, our underpin will be quality growth as well as cash generation. And again, just to illustrate that point, we did improve margins despite the activity that we saw on different fronts in Hong Kong by 2 percentage points, which is a good illustration. And I gave some other stats to illustrate the point as to the discipline that we are adopting in focusing on quality growth in Hong Kong.

What we are interested, Nasib, is market share of new business profit and market share of profitable growth in Hong Kong as opposed to simply driving sales market share. But as I said, broadly within the construct of quality, absolutely will be driving a greater level of market share. Ben, you want to take the last one?

Yes. Hi, Nasib. So yes, look, it's our plan to largely complete the investment in capability program in 2026. We'll be investing a further $300 million to $350 million. And this investment essentially covers foundational dimensions. I'm not expecting material amounts in 2027. And we're being very disciplined about our spend. As I mentioned earlier on the call, our focus is on driving operating leverage, and that enables ongoing investment in capability in the normal course of business beyond the target period.

Okay. Thanks, Ben, very much. Jake, I'm going to pass back to Anil to close the call. He's just got some very closing remarks.

Thanks, Patrick, and thanks, everyone. Enjoyed the questions. And hopefully, we were able to provide you a greater level of detail and insights. We have made good progress in our transformation journey. And clearly, this would not have been possible without the dedication and the hard work of our people, our agents as well as our partners.

I'm very proud to work alongside them every single day in the way we support our customers, communities and shareholders. A few of us will be on the road, so we will get an opportunity to meet with you face-to-face and would be happy to kind of get into further details and further conversations if we haven't been able to answer some of those points. We look forward to updating you on the first quarter business performance in early May. And as I said, I look forward to seeing you when we are on the road. Thank you, and goodbye.

Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.

Hello. I'm Anil Wadhwani, CEO of Prudential. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our full year 2025 results and update you on the progress that we are making on our transformation journey.

2025 was a year of high-quality consistent growth. We delivered double-digit growth across our key financial metrics, consistent with our guidance while continuing to strengthen our business. We achieved this through strong execution, driving broad-based performance across our markets and channels.

Our strong balance sheet, disciplined capital management and predictable cash generation mean that we can grow and invest as well as return significant capital to our shareholders. We have completed our $2 billion share buyback program, listed our Indian AMC business and increased our dividend per share by 15%. We launched a further $1.2 billion buyback in 2026. Our consistent strong execution produced double-digit new business profit growth in every quarter of 2025. This gives us the confidence that we will again deliver double-digit growth across our key financial metrics in 2026 and that we are firmly on track to achieve our 2027 financial objectives.

Through our multi-market multichannel business model, we delivered consistent high-quality double-digit growth in line with our guidance. New business profit grew 12% to $2.8 billion. Operating profit per share grew 12%, gross operating free surplus generation grew 15% to $3.1 billion, and we grew our full year dividend per share by 15%.

Turning to our new business performance by market. We delivered broad-based growth across the group with all segments and channels growing year-on-year. In Mainland China, we grew new business profit by 27% with bancassurance as the main driver. Our focus on sustainable, high-quality growth underpinned by disciplined risk management resulted in a meaningful shift in product mix towards participating business.

At the same time, we delivered double-digit growth in both new business profit and APE across agency and bancassurance in the second half of the year. Agency transformation is progressing well with a stronger emphasis on quality recruitment. As a result, the number of active agents grew by 9% in the second half.

In Hong Kong, new business profit was up 12%, and I really like the shape of our Hong Kong business. We saw growth across the domestic segment and the Mainland Chinese Visitor segment, which shows the strength and the balance of our franchise. Importantly, both our primary channels, agency and bancassurance continued to grow.

We remain very focused on recruiting high-quality agents, and that is reflected in our performance with active agents up 12% year-on-year. Demand for our innovative proposition also continues to gain traction, particularly where we combine savings with health and protection, for example, through our innovative Encash product.

Taken together, this gives us real confidence in the quality and sustainability of our long-term prospects in Hong Kong. Indonesia delivered 11% new business profit growth. Agency momentum picked up as we implemented our transformation program. This supported an 18% uplift in productivity, and we continue to focus on recruiting high-quality new agents. The bancassurance channel progressed well, supported by a growing contribution from our new bank partnership with Bank Syariah Indonesia, Indonesia's largest Shariah bank.

In Malaysia, new business profit grew 5%, driven by strong bancassurance performance. The agency channel recovered well from the market-wide disruption seen in the first half, delivering double-digit new business profit growth in the second half.

Our agency transformation program is focused on quality recruitment as well as continuing to build our top-tier agent pipeline. I was also pleased that we agreed and completed an increase in our shareholding of our conventional business to 70% in January 2026. In Singapore, new business profit grew 2%, with margins reflecting a shift in sales mix towards savings and wealth and changes in the pattern of demand in our health and protection business. I was particularly encouraged by the strong momentum in agency sales in the second half of the year.

This underscores the benefit of our multichannel distribution platform where we have distinct strengths across tied agency, financial advisory and bancassurance channels. In India, there was a softening of sales, largely reflecting a strong comparator in 2024. Our focus remains on improving margins, and I was pleased to see that retail, health and protection performed well.

A quick update on our stand-alone health business. We are progressing well through the regulatory cycle, and we are preparing to launch in the near future. We also delivered good growth across Taiwan, Thailand and our African markets. And at Eastspring, our integrated asset management business, we grew operating profit after tax by 12%. Funds under management grew 8% from $258 billion to $278 billion, supported by strong external retail flows, continued inflows from our life business and favorable market conditions.

Let me now highlight the progress we are making in our 5-year transformation program. Starting with agency. This continues to be a core driver of our new business profit growing at a CAGR of 19% over the past 3 years. More recently, agency new business profit growth moderated to 4% year-on-year compared with 27% growth in bancassurance. Importantly, productivity continued to improve with new business profit per active agent up 15%, more than offsetting the decline in active agent numbers.

We remain highly focused on driving the acceleration of our agency transformation. It is our #1 priority. Bancassurance, on the other hand, delivered another very strong performance, as I mentioned earlier. Performance was broad-based with 13 markets achieving double-digit growth, driven by deepening of our key strategic alliances and broadening customer access to our propositions.

Margins expanded by 5 percentage points, reflecting the quality of our growth. On health, I am pleased with the establishment of a dedicated health-focused vertical. This has allowed us to embed strong discipline across medical repricing, partner network management and fraud, waste and abuse while scaling the business.

Over the past 3 years, our health business has grown at a 12% CAGR. In 2025, growth moderated to 3% as expected, reflecting the second half normalization following the pricing actions taken in the prior year. A 9% growth in premiums sustained our profitability. At the same time, we focused on reducing claims costs using analytics and AI to cut fraud, waste and abuse by more than $100 million while enhancing our partner network management.

Finally, on customer, we continue to improve customer experience, applying technology and data analytics to deliver stronger propositions and simpler, more intuitive customer journeys. As a result, retention improved by 1 percentage point to 88%, and we now have 6 business units in top quartile for relationship Net Promoter Score, up from 3 in 2022. Looking ahead, we are focused on continuously improving customer experience as we work towards achieving top quartile outcomes across all our top 10 markets.

In 2025, we executed our strategy with discipline and focus, investing in key areas across agency, bancassurance, technology and operations to drive quality growth and improve efficiency. Our corporate actions demonstrated a strong and disciplined application of our capital allocation framework. We divested Eastspring Korea and realized $1.4 billion from the December IPO process of our Indian asset management operation and today hold a 35% stake in the company.

Turning to 2026. Our key focus areas are: firstly, we will sustain the strong momentum in bancassurance while accelerating agency strength and quality. Second, we will continue to enhance the quality of new business by deepening customer engagement, unlocking greater synergies with our internal asset manager, Eastspring, and growing health and protection. Third, we will enable the delivery of more efficient growth by continuing to modernize our technology and digitize our platforms, improve operational efficiency and further embed analytics and AI across our core business operations.

And finally, we remain committed to disciplined capital management and delivering ongoing shareholder returns. Let me expand on each of these points in turn. Prudential is the leading life bancassurance franchise in Asia. The channel delivered an outstanding year. With new business profit crossing the $1 billion mark, bancassurance has already delivered around 95% of the lower end of its 2027 new business profit objective.

Bank distribution remains one of our most significant channels across the region, and our success is built on deep long-standing strategic partnerships with leading banks. We continue to offer relevant solutions to customers across their life stages, for example, with health and protection propositions, which now account for 1 in 2 policies sold through the bank channel.

Let me illustrate how we are deepening relationships across our strategic alliances. With our new partner, Bank Syariah Indonesia, we are rolling out innovative Shariah-compliant products to serve the needs of its 20 million strong customer base. And with our long-standing partner, CITIC Bank, we have accelerated our sales momentum by sharpening our focus on their top 50 outlets, driving stronger execution and productivity.

Our agency channel remains a significant competitive advantage for the group, representing well over half of our new business profit in 2025. Strengthening this channel is a key part of our overall quality growth strategy. We have grown new business profit through this channel at a CAGR of 19% since 2022.

Productivity is highly correlated with agent quality with new business profit per active agent up 15% year-on-year. Our most productive agents, MDRT qualifiers are over 7x more productive than the nonqualifiers, and we have the second largest MDRT force globally. In our developed markets, which contributed to 73% of our agency new business profit, we have seen good all-around delivery in both productivity and activation with both growing at a CAGR of 17% between 2022 and 2025.

While our emerging ASEAN markets are doing well on productivity, up 7% CAGR since 2022, there is an opportunity to improve their activation. This is a key focus area for us. We are accelerating the transformation of our agency with a clear focus on supporting productivity and driving activation.

Starting with productivity, one of our most powerful levers for improving new business profitability is the growth of our top-tier agents. Today, they account for 59% of total agency new business profit, which grew at a CAGR of 27% from 2022 to 2025.

To further lift productivity from existing MDRT agents and build sustained upward momentum for high-potential agents into this tier, we are prioritizing a number of key enablers, including targeted recognition, structured upskilling programs, affluent segment-specific product propositions and AI-enabled digital tools. This includes PRUForce to strengthen lead generation and PRUAction to drive more effective performance management of our agents.

Importantly, the MDRT pipeline takes time to build. Progression up into this tier starts with the recruitment of high-quality new advisers. That is why productivity and quality recruitment are tightly linked in our agency transformation agenda. This leads directly to our second priority, quality recruitment.

Sustainable productivity and activation start with attracting individuals with the capability, commitment and ambition to succeed as professional advisers. To ensure new recruits reach their full potential from day 1, we provide structured end-to-end support, including through our PRUVenture program.

The program provides new agents with the tools, training and coaching required to perform at their best and reflecting an intentional shift towards a full-time professional and productive agency. We launched PRUVenture in Hong Kong, where it has scaled strongly. New recruits enrolled in the program grew by 43% last year and now account for more than 40% of all new recruits.

The results are compelling. In Malaysia, for example, where the program was subsequently deployed, new recruits were 6x more productive in generating sales. Looking ahead, we see a clear opportunity to industrialize the quality recruitment model across emerging ASEAN markets, including the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, where the traditional large agency forces have historically dominated. Alongside this, we are strengthening the broader ecosystem that supports quality recruitment and leader development. revamping compensation to reward quality and progression, upgrading leadership training and enhancing PRUForce with AI-enabled recruitment capabilities.

Our focus is clear and consistent across our markets, building a strong MDRT pipeline, embedding quality recruitment and scaling digital and AI-enabled capabilities. Building a scalable, high-quality professional agency force of the size of Prudential requires persistent focus and execution.

The shape of the agency transformation has been different compared to what we anticipated. I am pleased with the quality focus that has led to higher productivity, but less pleased with active agent numbers, which is where we are focusing our execution.

For us, quality growth underpins the consistency and resilience of our performance. Let me explain more on how we are doing this. First, we are deepening customer relationships with more tailored engagement. Our holistic differentiated propositions are designed to support customers throughout their lives. Enhanced digital tools are simplifying end-to-end servicing and making it easier for customers to interact with us at every stage of their journey.

Together, this has driven a 2 percentage point improvement in retention rates since 2023 and an increase in business units delivering top quartile customer Net Promoter Score. Second, Eastspring. It is a material contributor to shareholder value and a key differentiator that amplifies the value of our insurance franchise. The durable recurring life flows provide scale and continuity through cycles, while third-party flows diversify earnings.

Its 10 market footprint and deep local expertise strengthen the investment outcomes and enable development of innovative bespoke solutions, including in wealth and retirement, which benefits our customers. Third, we are focused on growing health and protection. We remain very excited about the significant opportunity. When you look across our key markets, there's a huge amount of unmet need, an estimated $43 trillion of mortality protection gap.

Today, health and protection accounts for 36% of new business profit. And looking ahead, our focus is on combining the strength of our health business with our established capabilities in protection. We are selectively integrating health and protection with our savings propositions and have seen strong success, for example, in Hong Kong.

To support this, we continue to foster innovation, strengthen training of our agency and bancassurance partners and refine our reward structures to promote even better outcomes in health and protection. We are embedding analytics and AI across the group with a business-led focus on 3 core areas: agency, health and operations, where we see the greatest potential to create value for all our stakeholders.

Across these areas, we are reshaping end-to-end customer journeys from advisory and onboarding through to underwriting, servicing and claims, making them simpler, faster and more consistent. Importantly, our technology stack allows us to embed AI seamlessly into our core systems. As a result, we are measuring and are already seeing tangible economic benefits as these capabilities translate into higher productivity, better customer outcomes and improved efficiency.

For example, we enhanced new business generation with $300 million in APE now delivered through our customer engagement platform. In underwriting, near-instant decisions have reduced underwriting time in Hong Kong by around 50%, improving both speed and quality of customer and agent experience.

We are also making everyday customer journeys simpler and faster, enabling on-demand service that has resonated strongly with our customers and drove 1.5 million interactions on our customer digital platform through services. And in claims, AI-enabled processes are improving efficiency and reducing fraud, waste and abuse by more than $100 million in 2025.

For us, the opportunity now is to industrialize AI at scale. We have put the right foundations in place, strong data quality, a cloud-based architecture, group-wide staff training and a strong risk and governance framework. Together, these foundations allow us to embed AI consistently across the business, moving from isolated use cases to a scaled, disciplined operating capability.

As I mentioned earlier, our technology stack allows us to embed AI seamlessly into our core systems, enabling the improvement of both our customers and our agents' experience. Let me bring that to life with a few examples. Through services, our digital customer platform now handles 90% of its transactions straight through without any manual intervention. operating across 9 markets, it enables seamless 24/7 superior customer service.

In agency, a key priority is to empower agents with robust digital platforms that improve management, productivity and execution. And we are seeing some great results. For example, PRUForce, our AI-empowered agency platform managed nearly 11 million leads for our agents. Additionally, PRUAction, which supports agent leaders with AI-enabled performance management of their agents delivered a 15% lift in productivity in Singapore.

Alongside this, I am excited about our partnership with WeLab, one of the largest digital banks in Hong Kong. This strategic partnership allows us to innovate and scale digital insurance distribution, leveraging modern technologies, including AI. Likewise, in India, through our greenfield health venture, we are building an AI native operating system to reimagine how we acquire and service customers.

This is an important and an exciting opportunity for us. Across all these initiatives, technology and AI are applied with clear intent, strengthening the core of our business today while innovating to build a resilient, scalable platform for long-term growth.

We remain firmly focused on disciplined execution that delivers high-quality growth and strong shareholder returns. Our progress is driving improved capital generation, enabling us to plan returns of more than $7 billion of capital to our shareholders between 2024 to 2027.

Looking ahead to 2027, we are confident in achieving our new business profit and our fee surplus generation objectives. Our aim is clear to deliver compounding high-quality growth that translates into new business profit, gross operating fee surplus and tangible shareholder returns.

We want to deliver both growth and cash for our shareholders as we take full advantage of the structural growth opportunities across the markets of Asia and Africa. Growth opportunities are particularly compelling in Asia, where our strong presence gives us access to the world's fastest-growing insurance markets.

Rising incomes, an expanding middle class and an estimated $43 trillion mortality protection gap in our markets underpin growth rates that are expected to be around twice the global average. Prudential is a premium franchise with leading positions in high-growth markets of Asia and Africa, a trusted household brand and a scaled distribution platform across agency and bancassurance.

Our multi-market, multichannel model positions us to capture the significant growth opportunities in our markets, delivering consistent, high-quality growth and generating sustainable shareholder returns. In 2025, we executed our strategy with pace and purpose, unlocking value across our core markets and making strong progress on our strategic priorities.

We met our 2025 guidance, delivering double-digit growth across our key financial metrics. For 2026, we are guiding double-digit growth once again, and we are confident of achieving our 2022 to 2027 objectives.

In summary, we are delivering high-quality growth, creating value and building consistency, moving Prudential closer to realizing its full potential. I will now hand over to Ben Bulmer, our CFO.

Thanks, Anil, and hi. I'm Ben Bulmer, CFO of Prudential plc. In 2025, we delivered on our guidance, double-digit growth in new business profit, operating earnings per share, capital generation or gross OFSG and dividend per share. We also executed a number of key strategic actions, including the successful IPO of our Indian asset management company, resolving the outstanding litigation in relation to our Malaysia conventional life business and completing an increase in our shareholding to 70%, the early completion of our $2 billion share buyback and launching our new capital management program.

In summary, we're delivering growth in value and what we believe is a highly attractive returns proposition, growing dividend per share greater than 10% per annum in 2026 and 2027, providing additional recurring capital returns, starting with $500 million in 2026, followed by $600 million in 2027. And consistent with reviewing capital above the 200% free surplus ratio, all of the $1.4 billion net proceeds from the Indian asset management company IPO and pre-IPO placement in December, which I will refer to as the IPO will be returned to shareholders. This will be split half this year, half next year. In all, we expect over $7 billion to be returned to shareholders between 2024 and 2027.

Our 2025 operational performance clearly demonstrates the strength of our business model. We intend to build on this momentum as we work towards and beyond 2027. We again guide to double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs of new business profit, operating earnings per share, gross OFSG and dividend per share, and we remain very confident in achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

In 2025, we continue to build our track record of delivering high-quality double-digit growth with new business profits or NBP, up 12%. I'm particularly pleased with the consistency of our performance with double-digit growth in every quarter of the year. This is a testament to the strength of our diversified multichannel and multi-market platform and the progress we are making in transforming the business.

Our growth was broad-based with all of our reporting segments growing NBP. In terms of channels, we again grew bancassurance strongly with NBP up 27%. This growth was diverse across our bank partners and included a 5-point margin improvement driven by favorable mix effects alongside repricing actions. 2025 bancassurance NBP is, as Anil mentioned, about 95% of the lower end of our 2027 target level.

We grew agency 4% and continue to take significant steps to improve performance and transform the agency force into a full-time professional advisory-led channel. Our other channels, largely representing broker distribution in Hong Kong and Taiwan grew 15%. A core pillar of our strategy is to focus on growing high-quality profitable new business, which quickly monetizes. 36% of our 2025 NBP was from health and protection products that typically have higher margins.

A further 50% was from fee-based participating and linked savings products, which limit our direct market exposure. This product mix, alongside previously highlighted repricing actions to our flagship savings products in the second quarter of 2024 resulted in a 2 percentage point increase in our new business margin to 42%.

Further improvement in our agency performance and increasing the proportion of health and protection business continue to provide opportunities to improve our margins over the medium term. We also delivered improved capital emergence with the expected capital addition to our 2027 objective year from new business up 16%, ahead of the 12% growth in NBP. Attractive capital return profiles are embedded across our products.

Overall, new business IRRs at our target capital levels remain in excess of 25% and payback periods were less than 4 years. I will now turn to the key new business highlights for each of our major reporting segments. Our Hong Kong business delivered another year of high-quality growth, driven by our proprietary distribution channels.

NBP increased by 12% to $1.2 billion, supported by 8% growth in sales volumes and a 2 percentage point margin expansion. This reflects our continued focus on high-quality health and protection business and long-term savings products and the benefit of repricing actions. Agency NBP grew 9% with strong recruitment of new agents lifting average monthly active agents by 12%.

The bancassurance channel delivered 25% NBP growth. Margins in this channel grew by 6 percentage points as we continue to improve our product mix. Health and protection products comprise over 60% of new agency cases and about 40% on the bancassurance side. In Mainland China, we maintained our focus on delivering high-quality new business growth, rebalancing to a greater proportion of long-term participating products.

NBP growth was 27% with strong APE sales growth more than offsetting expected margin moderation as the share of participating business increased by 24 points year-on-year to 39% of new sales. Our continued shift to participating business is expected to lead to a further modest margin decline over 2026. Growth was led by the bancassurance channel with NBP up 59%.

All of our top 10 partners delivered double-digit sales growth with a particularly strong performance from CITIC Bank. Agency continued its transformation journey with new recruits up 14% and active agents up 7%. Momentum improved in the second half of the year with NBP up 11% compared with the same 6-month period in 2024.

Going forward, we plan to progress our successful bancassurance strategy and to continue to develop our agency force, underpinned by a focus on prudent risk management. We expect this to support NBP growth in line with the group's double-digit trajectory. Finally, our Mainland China business successfully issued RMB 5 billion of perpetual bonds in January and announced a further RMB 4 billion of refinancing expected in June. This local financing provides a strong base to support the development of the business.

Turning now to our largest ASEAN businesses, starting with Indonesia. NBP was up 11% year-on-year with margins 4 percentage points higher. This was driven by medical repricing and shifting to more profitable traditional products.

On the agency side, NBP grew 6% despite civil disruption in the third quarter. NBP per active agent grew 18% as we continue to focus on quality recruitment and enhancing productivity. The bancassurance channel delivered very strong growth with NBP up 53%.

We saw good momentum in investment-linked products through both SCB and UOB and a promising contribution from our new partnership with BSI. In Malaysia, the business delivered an improved performance in the second half of the year with new business profit up 21%, taking overall NBP growth for the year to 5%.

As previously reported, there was market-wide disruption for agency in the first half following medical repricing. While agency NBP fell 2% over the year, performance rebounded in the second half with growth in NBP of 10% compared to the second half of 2024, driven by targeted product launches, strong recruitment and robust agent activation rates.

Bancassurance performed strongly with NBP growth of 21%. And finally, Singapore delivered 2% NBP growth in 2025, reflecting sales growth of 5%, offset by 2 points of margin compression as a result of a greater contribution of savings and wealth products in the mix of new business. At the distribution level, agency sales momentum accelerated in the second half of the year with new sales up 27%, focused on the savings and wealth markets.

Bancassurance NBP was flat over the year as lower sales were offset by margin improvements from pricing actions and the launch of new products. We continue to build our multichannel platform and remain focused on sustaining the sales momentum seen in the second half of 2025. On the bancassurance side, we entered a new partnership with CIMB in the fourth quarter.

Our growth markets segment delivered 12% NBP growth, driven by a 3 percentage point improvement in margin, reflecting favorable product mix effects alongside stable APE sales. In Taiwan, we retained our position as the #1 foreign insurer where our participating savings product suite remains a core competitive advantage.

We grew APE sales 5%, building on strong prior year performance, supported by both the bancassurance and brokerage channels. In Thailand, we've maintained our continued focus on the bancassurance channel. Overall APE sales were up 9%. In Africa, we saw growth across all our markets with APE up 24%, while in India, although overall sales were 2% lower, we made strong progress in retail protection with growth of 22%.

Finally, in Vietnam, 2025 has been a transition year for the life industry given the new insurance law and other regulatory changes. Operationally, we are focused on delivering quality new business and managing our in-force book. While new sales fell, our NBP margins improved. We remain confident that growth will return as consumer confidence is restored.

Eastspring is an important cash-generative value creator for Prudential. With a broad footprint across the Asia region, Eastspring is positioned to benefit from the significant opportunities ahead, servicing internal insurance funds and external client demand for Asia-focused asset management solutions. This is evident from its mix of funds under management and its capabilities across asset classes. Over 2025, Eastspring delivered positive net flows of nearly $13 billion, $7 billion internally and $6 billion from external clients.

This momentum was supported by improving investment performance. On the key 3-year view, 65% of funds under management outperformed benchmark, up from 61% in 2024. And on a 1-year basis, 74% outperformed. Year-end funds under management reached $278 billion, up 8% despite recognizing a lower share of our India asset management businesses funds under management following its IPO in December.

Operating profit after tax was 12% higher. This included 49% of profits after tax from the Indian asset management business. Following the IPO, we will consolidate 35%. In 2025, the group's embedded value per share grew strongly, reflecting strong operating profit from our continuing focus on quality growth and the benefit of our strategic and capital actions.

Operating profit rose 15%, driven by higher NBP, further growth in our in-force and asset management results and flat central costs. With a lower average share count, group embedded value operating EPS grew 21%, including the benefit of the $1.2 billion buyback and the gain on the IPO, our embedded value per share, excluding goodwill at the end of 2025 was $14.53, up 15%.

Finally, our return on embedded value improved 1 percentage point to 15%. We continue to see scope to improve this as we progress towards our 2027 financial objectives, driven by NBP growth, a return to positive operating variances and ongoing disciplined capital management.

Moving to our IFRS results and the development of our contractual service margin, or CSM, the store of future profit under IFRS 17. Underlying growth of 9% was for the third year in succession at the top end of our guided range. This reflects the attractive nature of the structural life insurance growth opportunity in the Asia region and the strength of our platform.

New business added $2.8 billion to the CSM, an increase of 9% year-on-year. Together with the unwind effect on a normalized basis, we added $4.6 billion to the opening CSM. The release rate was stable at 9.5% with a $2.6 billion release to the income statement. Finally, our closing CSM balance reached $25 billion, up 14%.

Turning to the IFRS income statement. The growing CSM balance led to an 8% increase in the release of operating profit of $2.6 billion. The net investment result was marginally higher year-on-year. This reflected a relatively small increase in overall business unit level owned funds given elevated remittances to the group center and only moderate growth in spread income following asset derisking actions in Mainland China taken in 2024.

The remaining components of our IFRS insurance result combined to a negative $0.1 billion. This includes our experience variances, the largest component of which relates to our ongoing capability investment program and a negative impact relating to interest rate movements.

Overall, operating profit from our insurance businesses was up 5%, but excluding the capability investments in both years and the interest rate effect, we estimate would have been up 7%. In 2026, we expect to maintain strong structural growth in the CSM and the related release, albeit with a slight moderation in the release rate given strong growth in longer-term savings products in markets like Mainland China and Indonesia.

In addition, I anticipate low to mid-single-digit growth in the net investment result. From 2027, I expect our insurance profit growth rate to accelerate with the completion of the capability investment program. Asset management profits were up 9% pretax, and we remain focused on tightly controlling our central costs.

Corporate expenditure was flat over the year. Interest payable on core borrowings increased slightly following our successful Singapore debt issue in May last year. The net investment return and other items declined, reflecting lower interest receipts given the effect of the share buyback on central cash balances and lower interest rates.

Finally, as guided, restructuring costs reduced to $171 million. I expect these to decline further to just under $100 million in 2026. The group's operating effective tax rate was 16%, marginally lower than the prior year. Looking ahead, we continue to expect an operating tax rate at around 17%. Overall, this results in OPAT growth of 7%. And given the 5% reduction in average share count, operating earnings per share grew 12%.

Since the launch of our strategy in August 2023, we have guided that 2025 would mark the inflection point on our capital generation path to our 2027 objective, illustrated with the now familiar chart on the left. So the delivery of 15% growth in gross operating free surplus generation or OFSG in 2025 is an important milestone.

The components of OFSG are summarized in the table on the right. The 2025 expected transfer was $2.7 billion, up 14%. This reflects our return to new business growth post-COVID and the year-on-year addition of new cohorts of profitable new business.

In 2025, total operating variances reduced modestly as a significant improvement in core variances was partly offset by higher capability investment. In combination with investment return on the free surplus and the post-tax asset management result, overall gross OFSG was up 15%. We reinvested just under $0.8 billion in growing profitable new business at very attractive IRRs. This was up 5%, broadly in line with growth in APE sales.

Central expenditure was higher in aggregate, driven by lower interest receipts on central balances. This resulted in group OFSG growth of 22%, a meaningful improvement. In respect of our 2026 capital generation, you will see from our usual monetization disclosures, the expected transfer is $3.1 billion, up a further 15% on 2025.

We intend to largely complete our capability investment program by the end of 2026 with an investment of between $300 million and $350 million. Looking ahead, we remain very confident in achieving our 2027 gross OFSG objective of above $4.4 billion.

We will meet this through growth in profitable new business and completing in-train actions to return to long-term net positive variances. Put simply, were we to repeat 2025 levels of new business in 2026 and neutralize our variances, 2027 gross OFSG generation would be over $4 billion. To this, we then add new business growth, and we have again guided to double-digit levels and a return to positive variances.

This chart on the left will also be very familiar to many of you, summarizing the building blocks of our 2027 OFSG generation. 2025 new business added a further $0.3 billion to the expected OFSG in 2027, up 16% on 2024 levels, increasing the total expected OFSG emergence in 2027 as of the end of 2025 to $3 billion. The addition of profitable new business in 2026 then adds to future capital generation, both in 2027 and beyond. Returning to positive variances is the other key to the achievement of our 2027 gross OFSG.

We've continued to make very good progress with core business-related variances shown in the bottom right-hand chart. In 2025, underlying variances improved to negative $45 million from negative $113 million, reflecting actions taken in strengthening our health claims management. We are also benefiting from economies of scale with total costs growing more slowly than revenues.

This will be supported by further improvement from positive operating leverage as we grow revenue and continue to contain costs through automation and other efficiencies. This positive leverage will allow us to continue to invest in our business on a normal course basis. In respect of capability investments, as I mentioned, we intend to largely complete our program in 2026.

In summary, we are very confident of returning to positive variances by 2027. Growth in capital generation underpins our free cash flow. 2025 saw particularly strong remittances to our holding company of $2.1 billion. While there will always be timing differences, you should continue to expect us on average to remit about 70% of business unit or segment operating free surplus generation to the group.

The movement in the holding company cash balance is shown on the right. Our free cash flow of $1.6 billion represents the remittances received less holding company expenses and the cash cost of centrally funded bancassurance arrangements. You then have the cash costs of the dividends paid and the $1.2 billion to complete the buyback program launched in 2024.

Finally, the $1.4 billion net proceeds from the IPO, along with our Singapore debt raise and various other items collectively added $1.6 billion, lifting the closing cash balance to $4.3 billion. The group's capital position remains highly robust.

Our free surplus ratio ended the year at 221% or 204%, excluding the $1.4 billion IPO net proceeds we plan to return to shareholders over 2026 and 2027. This is broadly consistent with the 175% to 200% normal operating range we have set out.

We were pleased that our financial strength and flexibility was recognized by S&P with its upgrade of our financial strength rating to AA, recognizing the resilience of our balance sheet backed by growing capital generation from writing quality new business. We retain considerable financial flexibility with a Moody's basis leverage ratio of 13%.

Our regulatory position also remains very strong with shareholder and total coverage ratios of 262% and 197%, respectively. The capital management update we provided in August reflected the strength of our capital position and our confidence following the progress of our strategic transformation in driving improved organic capital generation, both points we again reiterate today.

Our enhanced capital allocation framework reflects a move to a total return orientation and is summarized here on the left. We updated our guidance for ordinary dividend per share growth rates and announced that from 2026, shareholders will also benefit from additional capital returns.

This is intended to set a recurring and sustainable basis for returns going forward. In terms of ordinary dividends, we guided to greater than 10% dividend per share growth each year from 2025 to 2027, building on the 13% dividend per share growth in 2024. Our 2025 dividend per share is up 15%.

We said we would commence additional recurring capital returns in 2026 and the capital above our established 175% to 200% operating range will be assessed regularly. If deemed to represent an excess over the medium term, then capital will be returned to shareholders. Being more specific, we completed our $2 billion share buyback by the end of 2025.

In January, we launched a $1.2 billion buyback to be completed by the end of 2026, representing $500 million of recurring capital returns and $700 million of the proceeds from the IPO. We expect to return a further $1.3 billion in 2027, combining $600 million of recurring capital returns and the $700 million balance of the IPO proceeds. This is summarized on the right-hand chart.

Overall, we expect to return over $7 billion to shareholders between 2024 and 2027. We have a strong platform generating attractive margins and are positioning the business to deliver double-digit performance for many years to come.

I would highlight, in particular, our leading positions in the highly attractive markets of Asia and Africa, our focus on high-quality business, delivering compounding growth and predictable cash conversion, our ongoing actions and investments to enhance our capabilities and embed operating leverage and our strong balance sheet and predictable capital generation, facilitating cash returns to shareholders.

To summarize, Prudential delivered improving financial performance in 2025 with double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs, consistent with our guidance. This growth was high quality and broad-based with NBP up 12%. Our NBP CAGR from 2022 to end 2025 is 18%, just above the midpoint of our 2022 to 2027 objective range of between 15% and 20%.

Our focus on growing capital-generative new business, which converts to cash in the near term means we reached the inflection point on our gross OFSG path and our actions to improve our core variances are continuing to deliver. The consistency of our operating performance improved.

And while there is work to do, we were pleased to deliver double-digit NBP growth in every quarter of 2025. For 2026, we again guide to double-digit growth across our key financial KPIs of new business profit, operating earnings per share, gross OFSG and dividend per share and remain very confident in achieving our 2027 financial objectives.

Finally, this confidence in our strategic progress, driving improved organic capital generation is evident from our capital return actions, and we expect to return over $7 billion to our shareholders over 2024 to 2027. Thank you.