Sampo Stock

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sampo Group's Conference Call on the second quarter '26 results. My name is Mirko Hurmerinta, the Interim Head of IR at Sampo. I'm joined on the call today by Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud; and Group CFO, Lars Kufall Beck. The call will include a short presentation by Morten and Lars, followed by Q&A. A recording of the call will later be available at sampo.com.

With that, I hand over to you, Morten. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Mirko, and good morning, and a warm welcome to Sampo's Second Quarter Results Conference Call on my behalf as well. So Sampo delivered strong first half and second quarter results, driven by broad-based and durable top-line growth, disciplined underwriting, and continued cost efficiency improvements across the Group. Our first half like-for-like growth amounted to 3% and accelerated to 5% in the second quarter. This was supported by our Private and SME lines in all markets, which I will cover in more detail shortly.

Combined with stable strong margins in a favorable claims environment, the top-line growth translated into an underwriting result growth of 7% in the first half and 5% in the second quarter on a currency-adjusted basis. The operating EPS increased by 12% in the first half and by 6% in the second quarter. Meanwhile, our investment returns saw a healthy rebound during the second quarter, and our solvency coverage remained robust, of which Lars will elaborate on in a moment. Following the strong first half performance, we have adjusted our full-year outlook upwards, both when it comes to insurance revenues as well as for the underwriting result.

Now let's take a closer look at our key segments with a focus on second quarter development. Our largest business area, Private in the Nordics, saw continued robust top-line growth of 5% in the quarter. While the growth rate has slowed down a tad from previous quarters, it has become increasingly more volume-driven. During the second quarter, we saw increase in customer count as well as in the number of objects and object sales in all countries, while retention remained high and broadly stable. To me, this underlines the breadth and durability of our organic growth, which continues to be supported by our consistent efforts and initiatives to improve our digital customer journeys.

To give a few examples of our digital initiatives during the second quarter, our If mobile app reached 1.8 million downloads across the Nordics, meaning nearly half of our household customers now use the mobile app to manage their policies and report claims. In fact, during Q2, we reached our operational ambition of more than 70% of claims being reported digitally by the end of this year. We also expanded our AI-powered virtual agent, IfGPT, from Denmark into Sweden and Norway. And at the same time, we also launched an If Vet app in all Nordic countries, which allows pet owners to contact vets 24/7 free of charge.

Turning to the U.K. In the U.K., the pricing environment has remained competitive and on the somewhat softer side. However, we've seen further stabilization in pricing trends, and we remain well positioned to accelerate our growth when the cycle now turns. Nevertheless, I'm pleased to see that even in this somewhat softer market environment, we have continued to find carefully selected pockets of growth, supported by our investments in data, pricing capabilities, as well as in product innovation.

In the second quarter, we added around 180,000 customers, representing 13% growth year-on-year and 4% over the quarter. This drove the like-for-like top-line growth in our U.K. business to 7.6%, up from 1% in the first quarter. At the same time, we delivered strong margins within our target operating range, supported by continued operational efficiency.

Moving to Nordic Commercial, which was our fastest-growing segment in the second quarter with an 8.6% like-for-like growth, another proof of our diversified and durable organic growth. The growth was supported by improved traction in our SME portfolio, which saw accelerated growth of more than 5% in the quarter and a good increase in the number of customers.

Further, the second quarter's performance was propelled by several larger customer wins. One of these was a major personal insurance agreement in Denmark that provides access to comprehensive healthcare for 40,000 pensioners. This is an exciting expansion into a new segment and not only demonstrates our strong position in the personal insurance market, but also underlines the sustained structural demand for complementary healthcare beyond also the working-age segment. Given that there are over 1 million pensioners only in Denmark, we look forward to assessing this opportunity and opening up this new market field.

Now Lars will continue with some reflections on the investment performance and on our balance sheet.

Thank you so much, Morten. It has been somewhat of a ride in the financial market in the first half of 2026. And following the very unsettled first quarter we saw, the second quarter saw a sharp rebound both in the equity and fixed income assets. And that, of course, also naturally reflected to our investment portfolio. On top of the continued stable interest and dividend income we see, our core portfolio saw net gains of EUR 240 million, and that's roughly evenly split between fixed income and equities in the quarter. This was partly offset by a soft development in our 2 legacy assets, NOBA and Nexi.

And just as a reminder, the market value of Nexi is reported with a 1 quarter delay, meaning the second quarter figures here reflect the asset's actual performance in Q1. All in all, the total net investment income stood at EUR 360 million, which more than offsets the mark-to-market-driven net loss that we saw in Q1. If we turn to the Solvency development in Q2, that remains strong and unchanged from the first quarter. This was, of course, driven by a strong operating performance, offsetting the slightly negative market effects, which ended up being smaller than we had initially anticipated.

The main driver for the negative market effects was the symmetric adjustments, which increased to nearly 9% in the quarter, up from 5% last quarter. And hence, it is now almost maxed out under the current solvency regime where it can maximum be 10%. This is an important figure to keep in mind when looking at our solvency; with a 0 symmetric adjustment, all else equal, our solvency ratio would have been 180%.

So I'm naturally very happy with the 174% solvency with the symmetric adjustment being where it is at the moment. And also, just as a reminder, we deduct 90% of our operating result from our own funds each quarter. So the Solvency coverage fully reflects our distribution commitments to our shareholders. So with that, I leave it back to you, Morten.

Thank you, Lars. As mentioned in the beginning, following the strong first half year performance, we have adjusted our full-year outlook upwards. We now expect to achieve 7% to 9% insurance revenue growth and to deliver 4% to 9% underwriting result growth. The underwriting result range reflects the strong first half year performance and also includes what we know about July claims development, particularly regarding the big residential fire in Drammen in Norway. Our preliminary claims estimate from this fire is around EUR 15 million, primarily affecting our Private Nordic segment.

To conclude, the second quarter represented another extension to our track record of delivering durable and broad-based organic growth at resilient and strong margins, in line with our promises to our shareholders.

With that, I leave it back to you, Mirko.

Thank you, Morten and Lars. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

I have 2 questions, please. One is on U.K. motor. So it feels like the messaging that's coming out of Sampo is somewhat different from the other players in the U.K. market who are already alluding to price increases, whereas you're suggesting that the price is still stabilizing and relatively soft. So I was trying to sort of understand the comment there and what is it that you are seeing in the market? If you could give us a little bit more color as to how do you expect the U.K. motor market to develop, that would be quite helpful.

The second one is on basically your commercial insurance segment, Nordic Commercial, wherein I just wanted to get a sense of, one, your growth in the second quarter seems definitely very good, but it's driven by these one-off large deals that you have. Can we sort of extrapolate that into 3Q, 4Q? Or should we again expect a bit of a normalization going forward?

That said, the other question or more broader question I have on the commercial insurance space is basically, can you give us a little bit more color on the competitive landscape there? And the reason I ask this is basically yourself and your Nordic peers seem to be stepping away from large commercial business in the Nordic region, but yet you talk about competitive intensity or pricing pressures, and this is common across the board. So I'm quite curious if everyone is stepping away from business, where does this competitive intensity come from?

Good. I think I'll try to answer to these questions. First, U.K. motor market, the market situation and pricing is clearly improving, just to be clear on that. So you could sort of say that Q1 was definitely an improvement compared to Q4 and Q2 being an improvement compared to Q1. We still would like to see further price increases in the U.K. market. And we're not sort of saying that the cycle has turned fully yet, but clearly an improvement. And we are implementing price increases and also pricing for slightly higher inflation expectation and getting that through in the market. So an improvement. But I think it's a little bit too early to say that the cycle fully has turned.

But we're super happy about the development. And again, we are able to write and grow our business focusing on the 88% to 90% operating ratio target. When it comes to Nordic Commercial, I think in a way, you could say that the growth that we reported after Q1 was probably more of a normal situation than the growth that we reported in Q2. So I see that we have strong growth momentum, and I think you see that with more than 5% growth in the SME segment, good growth in the number of customers. So I think that we have good momentum also into the third quarter in the Nordic Commercial segment.

Competitive landscape, first of all, we are not stepping away from the large corporate segment. We are sort of still committed to that. It's a segment where we expect to make similar returns and similar profitability as we have in Private and Commercial in the Nordics. So we are still committed to that market.

Then competition in the large corporate and of the commercial market is, of course, a little bit affected by the international reinsurance market. But of course, the reinsurance market is a bit softening and part of that benefit is passed on to the large corporate customers. But apart from that, no new competition situation on sort of the more SME market side. So a stable competition there, I would say.

So can I just actually follow up on that one? So is it fair to then say like assuming that the reinsurance market stabilizes from here on, you should then see probably slightly higher growth in the Commercial segment because your headwinds are sort of gone?

I think I would sort of distinguish between what we call commercial and what we call industrial, large corporate. So what we call commercial is really sort of predominantly SME and where the international reinsurance trends are not really that visible. It's more similar to the Private market. So the impact from the international reinsurance market and those trends are more visible in our Industrial segment, so the large Commercial segment. And again, I mean, it's hard to say anything about the future. But again, there's been, from our perspective, very favorable reinsurance terms that, of course, is a benefit that we partly can pass on to customers and particularly in the property area.

The next question comes from Daniel Wilson-Omordia from Morgan Stanley.

I've got a couple here, mainly around, I guess, costs, both on the Nordic side and the U.K. side. So your cost ratio in Q2 improved 10 to 20 bps this quarter. Just wondering what still gives you confidence in the 40 bps cost ratio improvement that you guide for in the year. So yes, what gives you confidence around that number?

And then secondly, in the Private U.K., the cost ratio has improved now quite strongly for the last 2 quarters. Just wondering if you see this as sort of a trend that we can continue to expect? What's driven this? And more broadly, I guess, do you think that the expense efficiency around the U.K. can be better from here in a general sense? Just curious on your thoughts on that.

Yes. When it comes to the Nordic region and the Nordic cost ratio, we remain committed and strongly believe in the 40 basis points improvement, which is partially then fueled by synergies from the Topdanmark integration, reaching EUR 73 million now after Q2. So -- and then quarterly development on cost is something that we don't really focus that much on. It could be differences in when some expenses are being invoiced and stuff like that, that affect the quarterly ratio. So we more focus on the full-year development and again, strongly committed to the 40 basis points improvements that we expect to see for the next few years in the Nordic cost ratio.

When it comes to the U.K., also there sort of the cost ratio can always be a little bit volatile from quarter-to-quarter. But it's correct to assume that we have an efficiency potential that we are gradually taking out in our U.K. operation. So we have a positive outlook for sort of the development of the cost ratio there over time. Of course, we are growing and with scale comes, of course, potential efficiency improvements. And although we grow the number of live customer policies with 13%, of course, we're not growing manning in a similar manner. So we do see sort of underlying efficiency improvements in the U.K. business.

The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca.

So I have 2 questions that I can raise here. One is Swedish new business, new car sales, sorry. It seems that when we were tracking this data in July, we saw a much better print. I'm surprised it's not been noted by you, but I'm curious if you have also seen it and you agree with that data. And then so that could mean some kind of a slightly more positive effect or at least less drag from this line.

Second question is on the underlying 30 basis points. Would you say that improvement by a while, would you say this is a little better than you would have expected because I think you were indicating a little more conservatively or cautiously with the Q1 results? So if anything interesting here would be very grateful.

Yes. I haven't really seen the July new car sales figures in Sweden, if that's what you were pointing out. I think the Q2 new car sales was just slightly positive. So limited development really in the Swedish market in that respect. So the story still is that when new car sales will pick up in Sweden, it should support us on growth. And it's still a little bit of a headwind to us. So when we report around 5% growth on Private, it will be 6% when excluding the Swedish mobility.

Then when it comes to the 30 bps underlying improvement, I think we've been sort of improving the risk ratio with around 20 to 30 basis points for quite a while now. And I think we were starting to say that there is, of course, a limit to how long this will last. Otherwise, the combined ratio will be extremely low. So yes, perhaps slightly better than expected, but not a big change yet.

The next question comes from Nadia Claressa from JPMorgan.

I have 2 questions, please. The first is just on Private U.K. I think the message that underwriting margins remain in line with your target level is clear. But could you perhaps elaborate on this? And is this driven more by the cost efficiencies as you discussed previously, Morten? The reason I'm asking is because if we look at the loss ratio stand-alone, it has increased 3.8 points at H1. So just keen to understand where the new business written now sits?

And second, going back to commercial, in particular, SMEs, I think growth has improved there, as mentioned, quarter-on-quarter, but it is still below the 6% ambition as of H1. So should we be expecting a pickup closer to this target rate over the next few quarters? Or based on your current view, do you think that the market dynamics are just too competitive and therefore, it's not really supportive of this ambition at the moment?

Yes. Thanks. I think when it comes to the U.K., it's all about pricing and price sophistication. So the support that we get on the cost ratio side is helpful, but it's much more important to efforts that we put into improving on the data side, improving our pricing models. And we've done quite some investment in this area also in this year, perhaps in particular on the data side.

And with that, of course, we find new segments where we then expect to reach the 88% to 90% operating ratio. So I think it's more that sort of that is driving, again, price sophistication. And then, of course, a slightly more positive market, slight increases in premium levels, of course, is starting to help as well.

When it comes to commercial and SME, I think, yes, 5% is not too far from 6%. We've been up and around sort of the 6% figure sort of for a few quarters. I think first quarter, as I mentioned, was a little bit special in that respect. And I think we see a little bit of more normalization now in the second quarter. And we believe that we have a very strong position in the SME market. That market is becoming more digital and customer behavior is starting, of course, to mimic the behavior that we see in the Private market. So gradually, we expect to see that all of the investments we made in digitalization start to pay off also in the SME market.

And I think lastly, I think on the U.K. Private, just to make sure, I mean, the worsening in the loss ratio that we have seen in Q2 is exactly as expected because it's just a natural consequence of the lower rate levels that we saw from Q2 onwards last year now fully earning through in the book. So that's what's driving that deterioration.

Combined with seasonal, of course, patterns.

The next question comes from Emil Immonen from DNB Carnegie.

I was a little surprised maybe by the mention of IfGPT in the report. So maybe you could help me understand what is the tool really used for? What is the goal of using that tool? Do you have any metrics supporting efficiency improvements or something along those lines?

No, it's a customer service tool where, again, the customers can ask any question about their insurance matters, coverages and so forth. It gives really tailor-made answers. And of course, then it's part of our service setup, in particular, in the Private segment. It's too early, of course, to see real benefits, even though we see a very high usage of it. It's still too early to see that this is reducing the number of calls to the customer center, but that's, of course, the logic that with more of these tools, we should be able to reduce the number of calls to the customer centers and continue to improve efficiency on the customer service side.

Can you say any early metrics, is this liked by customers? What is the reception overall?

It's been really appreciated by customers. This was initially developed and launched in Topdanmark. And then we have sort of exported it to other countries. And it was a big success when it was launched. And therefore, we were very confident that this was something that we should also launch in the rest of our portfolio. So good response from the customers on this.

The next question comes from Carl Lofthagen from Berenberg.

I just have a follow-up on U.K. Motor. I'm just wondering what is the quantum of rate increases that you are putting through right now? I know some of your peers have highlighted kind of mid- to high single digits. Is that what you're doing as well? And then just on claims inflation, where you're kind of highlighting a little bit of increased inflationary pressure. Just wondering where is that coming from?

We typically don't sort of disclose too much about sort of our exact price increases, and it varies obviously sort of a little bit from segment to segment and product to product. But of course, we operate in the same market as competitors. And you could expect us to see, of course, broadly the same market trends that competitors allude to.

And then your second question on claims inflation, what we sort of are a little bit sort of focused on is, of course, inflation related to spare parts, inflation related to also sort of other claims types, but in particular, spare parts as a result of the ongoing situation still with the Strait of Hormuz. So we have added on a little bit extra pricing to cater for slightly higher inflation in the U.K. We also set aside a little bit stronger reserves to cater for higher inflation, both in the U.K. and the Nordics actually. It's not a big change. But I think in this environment, it's prudent, I think, to focus a little bit more on inflation and expect to see some effects in the sort of short, medium term.

The next question comes from [indiscernible] from Bank of America.

I was wondering if you can give us any information on how the ceding commission on the quota share has moved in Private U.K. at the most recent renewals? And then on the new deal in Nordic Commercial, anything you can give us on the margins or the returns where it is priced?

Will you take the quota share?

Yes, U.K. there, it's flattish. So there are no significant movements on that, that has any meaningful impact on our numbers.

And the new deal in Nordic Commercial, are you alluding to the new health insurance?

Yes, with the 40,000 pensioners.

Yes. That's underwritten with the same sort of profitability targets that we have for the rest of the business.

The next question comes from Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB.

A quick follow-up on the U.K. situation and the accelerated growth over there. Was the growth basically or virtually coming only from those mentioned selected segments or growth pockets that you have been identified? Or did you catch any further or new growth coming from the, let's say, more widely and then overall from the market?

Yes. I mean we have been growing quite steadily in the U.K., as you know, for a quite long time. And it's quite broad-based growth in motor. The growth is mainly coming from motor, so a little bit less in home. And again, it's quite broad-based in the different sort of product solutions that we have in the U.K. market. So nothing really special there. But again, supported by all of the investments that we do in data and data analytics and pricing, pricing sophistication.

Okay. And then on the rather uncertain or volatile inflation outlook, are you seeing the market participants overall being enough cautious with the current outlook for '27 inflation pressure, meaning that are they putting enough price hikes to offset the upcoming inflation?

I don't think we should answer too much on behalf of competitors. We focus on pricing for the inflation that we expect to see. And we see that we get those price increases through in the market. So -- and that perhaps indicates that other competitors are having a somewhat similar outlook. But I think, again, we rather focus on what we are doing than speculating too much about competitors' pricing.

Understand. Understand. Then finally, could you provide a kind of an update on the Danish court ruling earlier on in the spring? Do you still consider the reserves sufficient? Has there been any kind of a new info around this case?

Yes, I'll leave that to Lars.

Yes. No, thanks for the question. I think when it comes to the ruling from the Supreme Court, we still believe that the past is the past, so to speak. And as we announced in our Q1 release, the impact on old claims are expected to be covered by our events not in data reserves. So no changes to that.

And I think as a side note, of course, we are monitoring and following this up extremely closely. And when we spoke to our claims colleagues earlier this week, we have so far registered around 10 cases where the claimant have asked to have their case reopened in our portfolio and systems. When it comes to the current year, as we earn the premiums through, we, of course, reserve to the new and expected elevated claims level and the impact from that is fully included in our outlook for the year.

And then final comment, I think when it comes to future pricing, we have finalized our analysis of the expected impact, and we have a clear view of the pricing actions that we need to take. However, it's important to remember that the majority of our workers' compensation book in Denmark that renews on January 1. I hope that answers and gives an update on the Danish workers' comp case sort of broadly.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

All right. Thank you very much. That concludes the call today. Thank you for listening in.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sampo Group's Conference Call on the first quarter '26 results. My name is Mirko Hurmerinta, and I am the Interim Head of Investor Relations at Sampo. I'm joined on the call today by Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud; and Group CFO, Lars Kufall Beck.

The call will include a short presentation by Morten and Lars, followed by Q&A. A recording of the call will later be available at sampo.com. With that, I hand over to you, Morten. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Mirko, and very good morning, and welcome to the Sampo Q1 conference call on my behalf as well. Sampo had an excellent start to 2026 with continued strong operational momentum in all our segments, both in the Nordics as well as in the U.K. We delivered strong underwriting results, supported both by cost ratio improvements and favorable underlying risk ratio development. Our balance sheet remains robust in a somewhat volatile financial market, and we are increasing our full year guidance for the underwriting result as well as launching a new EUR 350 million buyback program.

But starting with the top line. Our insurance revenue increased with 8%, fueled by excellent GWP growth over the last 12 months. Reported GWP for Q1 isolated is a bit softer, however, largely affected by a mix of different factors, which I will cover more in detail shortly. Whilst the underlying trends continue to be highly supportive.

On the claims side, the Nordics saw a wintry start of the year, followed by an early spring and markedly more benign conditions towards the end of the quarter. This led to better claims outcome being more favorable than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. Driven by robust operational momentum, favorable claims experience and continued positive underlying development, our underwriting results increased by 9% on a like-for-like basis. Our operating EPS strengthened by 19%. This was driven by higher underwriting results, but also supported by certain technical factors related to currency hedging. Over time, you should expect an operating EPS that is more in line with the underwriting result growth.

I also would like to highlight the resilience of our balance sheet amid elevated market volatility, which Lars will elaborate on later in this call. On top of this, I would like to emphasize our reserve strength, where our prudent approach allows us to expect that we could cover the negative effects from the Danish workers' comp case within our existing reserves. Following the favorable start of the year, we have raised our financial outlook for 2026 and at the same time, enabled by our strong balance sheet, we have announced a new EUR 350 million buyback program.

Let's take a closer look then at our different segments. Starting with the largest business area, Private Nordic, where we saw a continued strong top line growth of 6%, supported by positive development in all countries and product lines. Norway continued to stand out with 13% growth, largely driven by rate increases. We also saw strong development in Finland, driven by an increase in customer count and new sales growth. In Sweden, the soft new car sales continue to be a drag on our white label motor insurance. However, our If branded motor portfolio continued to develop well, and we saw 10% growth in the quarter.

In the U.K., the motor insurance market saw a modest increase in prices during the quarter. However, overall, the market remained competitive but rational. We continue to find pockets of growth, which translated to 3% policy growth over the quarter and helped to offset the effect from lower average premiums. I would say that the market in the U.K. is still in a wait-and-see mode, and our focus remains on underwriting discipline and securing the portfolio quality, which has translated into our stable and strong margins during this somewhat softer part of the pricing cycle.

Moving to corporate business lines, where the competition landscape is a bit more mixed. The SME portfolio, which represents the majority of Nordic Commercial, continued to see good top line growth of 4%, fell in line with Q1 last year and supported by digital sales and increase in the number of customers. On the large corporate side, on the other hand, the market environment is more price sensitive. This affected Nordic Industrial as well as the upper part of Nordic Commercial, where we did lose a few larger clients.

However, both corporate segments reported strong underlying margins, and we saw another quarter of favorable large claims outcome, partly supported by the derisking actions that we've done to reduce the large property exposure. Here, we also benefited from lower reinsurance prices at the first of first reinsurance renewal.

Moving to Topdanmark and the integration. After faster-than-expected synergy realization in 2025, we have now updated the phasing of the Topdanmark synergies. We have almost doubled the expected outcome for 2026 and now expect to achieve a run rate of EUR 105 million for this year and correspondingly EUR 125 million in 2027. We remain firmly committed to reaching at least the EUR 140 million target by end of 2028. Going forward after 2026, we expect synergy realization pace to be more stable as we shift from more corporate center synergies towards more operational benefits.

Before letting Lars dive into the financial results and the balance sheet, let me make some few remarks on the inflationary risks related to higher oil prices caused by the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Firstly, our operational exposure to the Persian Gulf region is, of course, very limited and zero exposure to Iran. In the Nordics, claims inflation continued to come down over the last 12 months, but is still a bit elevated in some countries and with notable variations between the countries. In particular, Norway continues to see higher claims inflation. We naturally carefully monitor any potential uptick in claims inflation and remain disciplined in pricing.

In the short term, inflationary risks from this situation primarily affect motor insurance due to higher freight cost for spare parts. The property sector, on the other hand, is more labor-intensive and less affected short term. Our scale and diversified profile with long-term agreements with suppliers, repair shops, and other partners help us control costs and to take early actions on the pricing side whenever needed. In the U.K., the inflation risk is somewhat higher, both as a result of our business mix as well as a result of larger exposure to total losses and bodily injury losses. Consequently, our pricing in the U.K. already factors in an expected uptick in inflation.

So with that, over to Lars.

Thank you so much, Morten. And talking about our investment returns. As you know, the first quarter was very volatile in the capital markets, and it was actually somewhat unfortunate that uncertainty peaked right at quarter end. Of course, our investment portfolio is not immune to market volatility. And in particular, the flattening of the yield curve, where the short end increased more than the longer end impacted our results negatively.

However, if you take a closer look at the drivers behind the investment returns, you will see that our negative investment income was primarily driven by our legacy assets, NOBA and Nexi. Excluding these, our investment return was broadly flat in a quarter of significant uncertainty and volatility. Meanwhile, our portfolio continued to provide a stable interest and dividend income. And thanks to our relatively short duration on the fixed income side, we are now able to benefit from the increase in interest rates by reinvesting at higher rates.

Turning to our balance sheet. I'm very, very pleased that amid all of this volatility, our solvency remained robust, underscoring the strength and resilience of our balance sheet with low sensitivity to various market shocks. Excluding NOBA, which had a net positive effect on solvency, market movements had only 4 percentage points negative effect on our solvency for the quarter, more than offset by the continued strong operational performance. In late March, we received the approval from the Swedish FSA to extend the partial internal model to cover our Danish operations that formerly were under Topdanmark. This had around a 6 percentage points positive effect on solvency in Q1. And yes, including our U.K. operations is the next phase from an internal model point of view, but that will be a longer project as it means extending the model into a new market. It does require more data, use case experience, et cetera, et cetera.

Our strong solvency and balance sheet, of course, allows us to continue delivering attractive capital returns. As you can see, there's two accrual bars in the chart. The first one is the regular distribution accrual. And starting from Q1 this year, we are deducting a full 90% of our quarterly operating results as distribution accrual following the update of our distribution policy. This reflects the commitment to return around 90% of our operating results through regular dividend and buybacks to shareholders in a typical year. The second bar is the new buyback program, EUR 350 million that we announced today. Of this, approximately EUR 250 million is based on the 2025 operating result and EUR 100 million on the proceeds from the NOBA sale we did in February. With the latter, we have now delivered half of the up to EUR 500 million communicated at the last CMD, in terms of distribution from legacy assets. And we are, of course, remain committed to deliver the other half, but timing, of course, depends on the NOBA sell-down process.

Then finally, before I hand back to Morten, some words on the Danish Supreme Court ruling on workers' compensation last week. I'm sure that you're all well aware of the ruling by now, so I will not recap the background of the case. Firstly, this is, of course, an adverse outcome, not only for the Danish insurance industry, but also for the state and municipalities in Denmark, which are self-insured. Sampo, in line with the industry, expects the state of Denmark to take responsibility for the retrospective financial consequences.

Regarding the potential impact on Sampo, disciplined risk management is in our DNA, and this applies also, of course, to our reserving practices. For many years, a significant part of our reserves for Danish workers' comp has been allocated to what we call our ENID reserve, which stands for Events Not In Data, to cover for exactly this type of risk and exposure. We have established a number of scenarios for the impact of the ruling and continue to analyze it. Our current best estimate based on our conservative assumptions is that the potential impact on Sampo is expected to be covered within our existing reserves. And hence, we do not need to book an additional provision for this, meaning the effect on net profit and solvency is naturally expected to be limited. And our financial outlook, which was raised today, remains unaffected from the ruling as well.

So with that, I hand back to you, Morten.

Thank you, Lars. As mentioned, after an excellent start of the year, we have raised our financial outlook for 2026. We now expect 6% to 8% insurance revenue growth with an updated range from EUR 9.6 billion to EUR 9.8 billion and a 3% to 9% underwriting result growth with an updated range of EUR 1,525 million to EUR 1,625 million. The increase in underwriting result outlook is mainly attributable to better-than-expected weather and large claims outcome in the first quarter.

To sum up, our performance in the first quarter provided a solid foundation for attractive value creation for 2026, which is also the last year of our current strategic period. Therefore, we have now circled 17th of November in the calendar for our investor update. And I look forward to updating investors and analysts on our financial and operational ambitions for the next strategic period.

Thank you, Morten and Lars. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs. Vash Gosalia, your line is now unmuted. Please go ahead.

Next question and get back to Vash in a moment.

The next question comes from Youdish Chicooree from Autonomous Research.

My first question is on the top line development in the Nordic segments. Obviously, in Private, the growth is still solid, even if lower than last year. But in Commercial, there has been quite a big step down, and you mentioned the loss of a few large clients. I was wondering if you could comment on the competitive environment who are the competitors and what is the outlook for the segment? That's my first question.

Secondly, on the U.K. market, you described the pricing environment as rational in Q1. But to my mind, rational pricing would have been price increases that match inflation at least, so 5% or more. So can you elaborate exactly what or why would you say the market is rational currently? And again, if you could just tell us a bit about what are your expectations for the coming quarters?

Yes. Good. I'll try to answer these two questions. First, on top line in the Nordics. Yes, we continue to have a really excellent performance in the Private segment, 6% growth, 7% if you exclude the headwind that we still have from the white label motor insurance in Sweden. On the SME side, also good development, 4%, roughly in line with what we saw last year, where we had 5%. And then we did see some loss of larger customers in the upper Commercial and Industrial. This is, as I would say, sort of just normal volatility. I mean, sometimes you win a few large customers, sometimes you lose a few large customers.

On the large corporate side, some of these losses are more on a gross level than net. So we actually have a much better net written premium development than gross written premium development in the Industrial segment. And then one should also bear in mind when looking at reported gross written premium that this reflects in a way, renewal patterns. And a very large part of the Industrial book is being renewed in the first quarter, very large part of the Commercial book, in particular, upper Commercial book is renewed in the first quarter. Which means that you kind of technically a little bit of a drag in the beginning of the year, whilst the areas where we see strong growth, Private SME is more renewing throughout the year. So there are also some effects like this, that makes Q1 a little bit soft on the outset.

To the U.K. market, yes, it's rational, and that includes also slight price increases. I think as I said in my introduction, it's probably too early to say that it has changed totally, but we definitely see slight price increases. And Hastings is also now gradually including more pricing for inflation and is able to get that through in the market. So, a slight positive development, I would say, on that front.

The next question comes from Hans Rettedal Christiansen from Danske Bank Markets.

Just firstly on the sort of better or the very good results this quarter on weather, could you just explain, is it sort of frequencies that are more favorable? Or is it the claims mix that has been kind of better than budget for the quarter?

And then secondly, on your premium growth in the Private Nordic segment. I guess it's still at a very high level, but trying to understand the step down on perhaps private property and also on motor from the previous quarter and from 2025 and sort of how we should think about that developing here going forward? And just relating to that question, you had a very interesting chart on Page 11, I think, in the presentation where you're showing the average motor repair costs across the countries. So I was just wondering if you could kind of touch upon that one against the sort of pricing as well on the Private Nordic segment.

Yes. I'll see if I manage to answer these ones as well. When it comes to weather, I guess it was a little bit surprising, I mean, given how harsh the winter was and definitely felt in January and February. It was a very cold winter in the Nordics. But it was also very stable winter. And typically, it's more when you have large variations in weather that you see an uptick in claims frequency. So what we've seen is that the frequencies are more benign than what we expect in a normal winter. And then also the winter came almost overnight, and it also disappeared almost overnight. So March was a very benign month from a weather perspective. Then, of course, on top of this, also a positive large claim outcome that is, of course, also driving a favorable underwriting result development.

On the Private Nordic growth, yes, we continue to see good growth momentum. And as I said, 6%, 7%, excluding the white label insurance in Sweden. And that part, of course, is what's driving down also the growth in motor overall a little bit. And then I think looking at growth on property and motor on a quarterly basis, it can always be a little bit of volatility. Then, of course, price increases in motor has clearly been more elevated than price increases in property, partially because you have repair cost of repairing new cars being higher than for, sort of, the somewhat older cars. So there's more inflation elements, I would say, into the motor market than in the property market.

And then repair cost and inflation per country, the country that really sticks out there, I guess, is Norway, where inflation has been clearly elevated over the last few years even. Of course, underlying inflation in Norway is higher than the other Nordic countries. Wage increases in Norway is higher than in the other Nordic countries. But then also the share of new electric vehicles are higher in Norway than in other countries. And again, this technology development in cars makes it more expensive for us to repair cars and again, is increasing the underlying inflation in a way in the motor market. So that's perhaps some comments on repair cost or sort of rather inflation in the different Nordic markets.

And just as a follow-up, could you perhaps say what the Y-axis on that chart is, to get an understanding of what the sort of inflation is that you're expecting for 2026?

That's just inflation in percentages, and we kind of are careful sort of not disclosing the exact percentages. I think it's something that we look upon as information we would like to keep for ourselves and not share with our competitors in particular. It's sort of estimate of inflation in the different countries.

The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca.

So my 2 or maybe 2.5 questions, let's say, is firstly, on the weather, the encouraging comments you made about frequency and how the weather was not so bad eventually. I'm just wondering if given -- I mean, sometimes weather also affects frequency, as you mentioned, should the underlying loss ratio not have been a bit stronger then because -- or was there something else, when we noted the 20 basis points year-on-year improvement in the underlying loss ratio in Nordics. I'm just curious if there was something else that you think is worth flagging?

My second question is on the Topdanmark synergies when you mentioned, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you -- I haven't heard at least in the EUR 140 million. This faster run rate, should investors get more excited about the ultimate level of the synergies as well and what could drive that?

And lastly, my quick follow-up on just the question just now on Slide 11. The 40 basis points, that's a very interesting number. Could you just say what is the assumptions about the actual conflict? Or is it 6 months? I don't know, I don't want to put a number. What's the duration you're expecting for the conflict that will lead to 40 basis points? Is it based on the data from Ukraine last time? Or just a little bit more on that 40 basis points and the underlying thoughts would be magic.

Yes. When it comes to weather and the 20 basis points underlying improvement, we do our best in really assessing the weather effects, large claims effects and factor that in when we calculate the underlying improvement in the risk ratio. You might remember in Q1 last year, we even said that weather was clearly more favorable than a normal winter and therefore, sort of adjusted for that. So the weather development is already, in a way, taken care of when we have the estimate of 20 basis points. So that's our kind of best estimate of the real underlying improvement in the risk ratio.

Topdanmark synergies, yes, we are realizing the synergies quite a bit faster than anticipated. But bear in mind, this is run rate synergies. So they are sort of not yet sort of materializing fully in the P&L, but this is sort of the run rate synergies that we have achieved so far. And when we set a target, and in this case of EUR 140 million, of course, we want to reach at least that target. We have not done any new bottom-up estimate of the synergies. So we still have the EUR 140 million as a target and of course, are really firm on delivering at least that.

On the inflation assumption related to the current situation in the Persian Gulf, this is, of course, extremely difficult to estimate. And it is a moving target. It kind of almost changes on a daily basis. What is important for us to communicate is that we are able, of course, to price for this. We are always looking ahead when pricing for inflation. And it's also quite likely that this will creep in quite gradually into our business since we do have long contracts with suppliers, body shops, and so forth.

And also in particular in the Nordic region, salary processes is a yearly process. So we have a lot of visibility, of course, on the salary part of inflation also for the next year. And again, 40 basis points is the best estimate so far. We are, of course, pricing ahead of this in our motor pricing and it's mainly coming from increased cost of spare parts. So we've done sort of modeling of what spare parts on what brands are being transported on a long distance and would be sort of more impacted and so forth. But again, of course, the situation is very uncertain, and this is sort of estimates which change more or less on a daily basis.

The next question comes from Ulrik Zürcher from Nordea.

I have two. I don't know if you said it, but the SME growth or commercial growth without this loss of big clients, roughly what would that be? And then secondly, I'm just wondering with this updated Topdanmark synergies and in the Middle East and it might add some revenue, I don't know. But how does all of this affect your 40 bps improvement sort of target in the Nordic cost ratio? Will that be more front-end loaded or just continue roughly at that level for some years?

Yes. SME growth, 4% in the quarter. So that's the answer to that. And the Topdanmark synergies, Lars, how will that impact us?

I think what we are committed to is the 40 bps improvement year-on-year throughout the years, the few years to come in our period as we have committed to. As I said, we now do see a flattening of the speed or acceleration as the IT part is still ahead of us. So we stay committed to the 40 bps improvement in our Nordic cost ratio that we've stated.

The next question comes from Nadia Claressa from JPMorgan.

I have two. So first is just on the impact from the Danish ruling, clearly a positive on the current view. But I think you mentioned that you've established a number of scenarios and that you will continue to analyze this. So what key variables really drive the difference between, I guess, the low and high end of the range? I think I'm just trying to understand how sensitive the current best estimate could be to changes in assumptions and under what circumstances could we perhaps see a revision on this front? That's my first question.

And my second was on the share buyback and timing going forward. Given that the Danish ruling impact appears to be contained and assuming you'll be able to sell off more of NOBA sometime this year, is a buyback top-up later in 2026 something you would consider? Or should we take this off the table and assume that you will stick to the once every 12-month time line?

I'll leave these 2 questions to Lars, who is not only the CFO, but also the Danish workers' comp expert.

Thanks, Morten, and thanks a lot for the question, Nadia. As you rightfully say, we do not disclose our best estimates for the impact as we believe it is covered within our existing reserves. I think secondly, let me just make this very clear. It's no surprise to us that we are exposed to this kind of risks when underwriting Danish workers' comp. And that is, as I said earlier, exactly why we, over a number of years, have been building up and allocating quite a significant part of our Danish workers' comp liabilities to an ENID reserve, i.e., Events Not In Data.

If you do want to compare us with competitors out there, we have been analyzing the case in great detail and established, as you said, a number of scenarios. And the comparable expected net of tax impact from those scenarios ranges somewhere between EUR 80 million and EUR 160 million with our best estimate falling well into that range. As you said, there are many, many variables in this. I mean I think the simplest one may be taking market share. Even in non-life insurance, a lot has happened in the market over the last 30 years. So just taking last year's market share does not reflect the exposure correctly, we believe.

However, when you look into that, analyzing the market share data, that's actually complicated because official market data statistics only go back to 2008, and this covers back to 1996. But as you know, we are a data-driven underwriter. And in our data pool, we actually have very good data and proxies for not only our own portfolio, but also market data going back to well before 1996 actually.

Another key variable just to mention it, is the pickup rate of those that are now eligible to have their case reopened. Here, we don't have much, I would say, empirical data to go by, but one data point we do have is the so-called Section 17a ruling from the Supreme Court that came out early 2025, i.e., more than a year ago. And based upon that, we do see that the pickup rate for those eligible to having their case reopened following that ruling after more than a year now is only about 5%. And I would say some of the market impact estimates you see out there and also the higher end of our internal scenario building, actually assumes a 20% pickup rate from the recent ruling. And as you have seen probably also both public or public info on ranges for the market impact that are out there ranges from billions of kroner to the estimate that was actually put forward in the Supreme Court by the plaintiff of DKK 235 million. So just to give you a view of where the ranges are.

Finally, let me just say that we still believe that the state of Denmark should intervene and should take the cost for this recent ruling, not because of the size or potential size of the bill, but because the AES or the Labor Market Insurance is a public authority who by law is responsible for claim settlement in the relevant cases here. A public authority, which we now know have not been acting in accordance with the law for the last 40 years. And the consequence of that should not end up with the risk carriers. Being that the private insurance sector as ourselves nor the self-insured municipalities and similar. So I hope that answers the question on the workers' comp.

When it comes to buyback, I mean, the new buyback that we just came is in line with our distribution policy. And as I said, we are committed to deliver up to EUR 500 million of buyback or release from our legacy assets. Normally, as we also communicated earlier, we believe Q1 is actually a good opportunity to discuss capital structure and buyback following the annual results for last year. And I said with that, we have announced that we will have an investor update in November, and that is where we would then return to this. But as I said earlier, I just want to reiterate, we are still committed to delivering up to -- returning up to EUR 500 million from the disposal of legacy assets. But the timing, of course, depends on actual sell-down of NOBA.

Just a quick follow-up on the potential for a top-up in the share buyback, if I may. I mean, clearly, it depends on the timing of further NOBA sell-downs. But could we also expect some of the benefit from the PIM expansion to be returned as well?

I think I would approach it a little bit from a different angle here. I think not saying anything about the impact -- positive impact from the PIM approval this time around, is a result of us looking at the world around us we are in, we are going through, I believe it's fair to say and have been going through very stormy waters throughout the Q1 in the financial markets and in the world surrounding us. And hence, at this point in time, we believe it is better to be a little bit safe rather than risk of being sorry later. So I think having a little bit of conservatism and not maxing out on our buyback potential, that has been our approach for the Q1 closing. Depending on what happens, of course, in the world surrounding us, we might change that view or our view on that later in the year, but that remains to be seen.

The next question comes from Carl Lofthagen from Berenberg.

Two, please. The first is on the Middle East impact. Are you seeing any early frequency benefits in your motor book from people perhaps choosing to drive less as a result of higher fuel prices?

And then the second is just on pricing in the U.K. I'm just trying to understand the changes throughout the quarter, whether as we kind of reach the tail end, whether you saw kind of accelerated pickup in pricing compared to the start of the year?

Yes. Very simple answer to the first one, no. We don't see any changes in driving pattern so far. One could, however, expect if inflation increases a lot, then you could expect that potentially could be a situation. But so far, we haven't seen any changes in driving pattern despite high fuel prices.

Pricing in the U.K. throughout the quarter, I think already on the full year conference call, mentioned that prices went slightly down at the very beginning of the year following a favorable reinsurance renewal for probably most insurers. And part of that was brought forward to the customers then. And after that, we've seen a gradual uptick in the pricing in the U.K.

The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

Hopefully, you can hear me this time around. I have two questions and one quick follow-up. The first one is just following up on the Danish workers' comp. Here, I just wanted to clarify something. So you mentioned that you've been reserving for this issue for many years. But as I understand it, in the context of the case that this only became an issue last year post the January 2025 ruling. So just trying to understand what did I miss over there? And how is it that you've been sort of reserving for this for many years? That's the first one.

The second one is just on your guidance for your underwriting profit for the year versus the synergies that you've accelerated for the year. So you have around EUR 50 million benefit from synergies that you expect in 2026, but then your underwriting guidance only moves up by roughly EUR 25 million. And as you stated, that's driven by weather and large losses. So can you just help us understand the bridge between both these numbers? Because I would have expected in that case, your increase in underwriting profit or guidance to be much higher than what you have done today.

And then the last one, just on the U.K. Are you able to share with us as to what is happening between renewal pricing and new business pricing? Because I'm just trying to understand here what is keeping the prices low or basically what could be one of the reasons why pricing does not increase at a faster rate?

I'll take the first one, Vash, in terms of workers' comp. I'm sorry if it was misunderstood. What I did say was that this case was not -- has not been known to us for many years. But what I did say is that the exposure to these kind of risks and court rulings, et cetera, is no surprise to us. And that is why over a number of years, we have been building up and allocating, as I said, a significant part of our Danish workers' comp liabilities to this ENID reserve, so for Events Not In Data.

So no, we have not known about this case for many years, but we have known and we are very aware of the risks that you take on when you underwrite workers' comp, and that is why we also have the prudent reserving principles in our balance sheet.

Makes sense and then on the other two, please.

On the underwriting profit, first of all, synergies, of course, are already included in the 40 basis points expectation for the coming few years. We have now realized them somewhat faster than expected. But what we're reporting is a run rate synergy. So it's not yet sort of fully materializing in the P&L. And at the same time, it allows us also to do some of the investments in terms of digitalization of the Danish business a little bit faster. So we stick to our 40 basis points cost ratio improvement for the Nordic business for the coming few years and again, largely supported by exactly these synergies.

When it comes to renewal price versus new business price in the U.K., of course, with GIPP reform, this is more or less one-to-one. We need to price new business just in the same way as we price renewal business. I'm not really surprised about the development in the market. If you look at the large motor insurers, you see that they are sort of typically reporting a fair profit for 2025. Then, of course, pricing was clearly higher at the first half of the year, sort of where we saw kind of really the reduction, then being more flat towards the second half of last year, and now it's starting to creep up a little bit.

So I kind of remain optimistic about the U.K. market. And I think, of course, over time, we will need to price for inflation, and we do that and the competitors will need to price for inflation. And again, as I already mentioned, we are even adding on slightly more price increases now given the inflation outlook that we have in the U.K. market and see that we managed to get that through in the pricing.

The next question comes from Youdish Chicooree from Autonomous Research.

The first one is a technical question on the workers' comp charge that you're not taking actually. I just wanted to understand like this Event Not In Data buffers that you hold. As you use those up when the claims come in, in the coming years, does that mean that ultimately, you have to replenish them. So basically, it absorbs the initial cost, but ultimately, you will have to actually reserve more in the future? So that's the first question, which is a technical one.

The second one is just on the Nordic segment underlying risk ratio. I mean pricing in the Nordic region peaked in May last year and your repricing actions are largely complete. Should we expect a more flattish trajectory going forward as opposed to the 20, 30 basis points improvements we've been accustomed to in recent years?

Thanks for the question. Youdish, if I take the workers' comp part first. Yes, as I said, the current ENID reserve we have is something that has been built up over many, many years. So it's clearly not something that you just all of a sudden wake up a quarter and say, "Let's put this in our balance sheet." So it has come over many, many years. And hence, any drawdown on this that would be taken out from the recent ruling, we would, of course, have to build up the ENID reserve again. But again, that will be done over time. It would not be something that will be done from quarter-to-quarter or even year-to-year, it is something that has been built up over more than 10 years. And as I said, replenishing it would also happen over a longer time horizon as we do not fortunately see these kind of rulings every year. So I hope that answers the question.

Yes. And to the Nordic underlying risk ratio improvement, we are at a combined ratio level now that is highly attractive in the Nordic region and typically in all countries, all segments. So I think it's fair to expect that the improvement in the underlying risk ratio will be somewhat smaller at least going forward. I still think there is some potential for improvements in pockets of the business. But again, we have a very attractive combined ratio. And of course, there is a limit for how many years and how far down you can push a risk ratio. So a bit more moderate improvement going forward, I think, is fair to expect.

The next question comes from Simon Brun from ABG Sundal Collier.

Just a couple of questions. Starting with Denmark and the premium growth in Denmark seems to be a nice uptick and somewhat of a trend shift in the premium growth. And I appreciate that there's always some element of volatility here, but does it also reflect some sort of revenue synergies from the Topdanmark merger? I just wonder if you could comment briefly on whether you see sort of strength and relevance in new or existing markets that now translate into accelerating premium growth Or am I reading too much into it? That's my first question.

Yes. I think an integration process is, of course, never an easy process. And as you see sort of from the synergy estimates, we've done quite a lot of changes to the Danish organization starting to change the business model. Of course, that is always creating a bit of worries sort of internally and also can create some turbulence sort of towards the customers externally. We did see a small drop in retention rate in the private business throughout 2025 in Denmark, which was exactly as expected, again, when merging two companies, then closing down Topdanmark as a legal entity, when we notify 750,000 customers about the change of insurance provider and so forth, that will have an effect. So that was as expected.

And then we've seen that this is now gradually improving and even starting to see a slight uptick in retention rates. And at the same time, we've been rebuilding a little bit the distribution capacity, both in Private and SME in Denmark during this process. So I'm at least very optimistic about the outlook for Denmark. I think the most difficult part of the integration is now behind us and that the customers now also will start to see really benefits of being part of a larger group with even better processes, better services, more digital tools in particular. So yes.

Second question, continuing in Denmark, I guess, and on the workers' comp. Maybe not looking so much into sort of the -- maybe looking more to the future, looking for the -- just curious to hear your thoughts on the sort of the sustainability of you staying in that segment, obviously, you have a pretty big market share. Is this segment still attractive to you? What needs to be done on the pricing to sort of cover the -- what seems to be clearly a wider scope of future claims. How long will it take to adjust prices? Where do you see them going? And could this be sort of a short-term boost to the premium growth as you reprice this quite meaningfully, I assume?

To start out, yes, we still believe workers' comp in Denmark is a highly attractive segment. We are the market leader, not only in terms of volume, but I would claim also in terms of knowledge when it comes to underwriting, when it comes to claim handling and when it comes to our actuarial skills. So yes, definitely an attractive segment to us. I think it's clear that, as always, we price for risk. So it's natural -- if risk changes, then it's natural to expect prices to change accordingly. I think it's important to note that actually, there's a fairly high degree of flexibility in here in the Danish workers' comp wordings in the sense that changes in law and ruling like this, you can actually adjust prices in the middle of a policy term or policy period.

However, we are not doing anything yet. We are, of course, analyzing and then we are waiting to see what will happen, both in terms of what the state of Denmark would ultimately do before we make any final decisions. But of course, we are prepared. We will change or we will price according to risk. And yes, we believe Danish workers' comp is an attractive segment and market.

The next question comes from Emil Immonen from DNB Carnegie.

Just maybe one more on the workers' comp and the decision in general. How does that impact your outlook on the insurance market overall, does it change it in any way? And what kind of decisions these courts take? Or is it kind of expected that this is normal business to you?

Let's say this is normal business. We do have some lines of businesses, some products that are exposed to changes like this, workers' comp, some of the bodily injury claims you have on motor. There are risks, new rulings, changes in, say, pension age, base of calculating loss of income. And this is sort of normal business risk to us. And this is exactly also why we are reserving for this type of risk, which is what Lars explained with these Events Not In Data. If you have a reserve model that just look at data, it will be backward looking. And of course, our reserving needs to be forward-looking. And that's why we try to factor in these things in our reserving and in our pricing. So this is normal business for us, and that's also why we are able to cover the effect of this case within our existing reserves.

So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

All right. Thank you very much. That concludes the call for today. Thank you for listening in.

Distinguished shareholders. My name is Antti Makinen. I've been the Chair of Sampo's Board of Directors for the past financial year. I would like to wish you warmly welcome to Sampo's Annual General Meeting 2026. In my presentation, I will briefly discuss the financial year 2025. The Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud, will, in his presentation, give you a more detailed review of the highlights and financial developments.

Last year was another excellent year for the Sampo Group in financial terms. The insurance revenue grew by 8%, which is a very good achievement in this business. The underwriting result grew even faster than the revenue as much as 13% from EUR 1,316 million to EUR 1,485 million. The strong growth of the underwriting result was driven not only by revenue growth, but also the decrease of the combined ratio, which declined from previous year's 84.3% to 83.6%.

Correspondingly, a key figure that is central in terms of the distribution of profit, the operating earnings per share, excluding extraordinary items and the unrealized change in value of investments increased by 7% to EUR 0.50. Perhaps the single most important event of last year was the change of Group CEO. Torbjorn Magnusson, who was first If's Managing Director for 18 years and then the Group CEO of Sampo from the beginning of 2020, announced his wish to retire from his role when we found a suitable successor. And after a thorough evaluation of potential successors, the Board of Directors in June decided to appoint the then Managing Director of If Morten Thorsrud as the new Group CEO from the beginning of October 2025.

I'm especially happy that the changeover from Torbjorn to Morten was perfectly seamless without even the slightest disturbance in the group's operations. Of course, Torbjorn Morten had had a practice run 6 years earlier when Morten was appointed Torbjorn's successor as Managing Director of If. The group senior management also saw recently another significant change as Group CFO, Knut-Arne Alsaker, resigned last autumn and the new CFO is now Lars Kufall Beck. Both the Group CEO and the Group CFO have seen successful changes and through internal appointments, which reflects our strong corporate culture and the long-term focus. And on the screen, you saw our extremely skilled and engaged core group.

The Board of Directors last year also discussed the distribution policy and changes to that policy were announced in early February and will be applied for the first time to the distribution of profit for 2026. We want to offer an attractive distribution of profit, taking into consideration the preferences of different investor categories. And according to this updated policy, we will aim to increase the regular dividend also in the future and complemented by share buybacks. And it is our estimate that in a typical year, the return to shareholders will be approximately 90% of our operative earnings and more than 2/3 of that will be as annual dividend.

In order to secure a strong but efficient balance sheet, we can also take action to return excess capital or to protect the balance sheet. So in practice, we will slightly increase the portion of annual allocation towards share buybacks. This will be implemented gradually aiming to increase the regular dividend while at the same time, reducing the dividend payout ratio from the current 70%. And in line with this policy, the Board has proposed that the dividend to be paid out would be EUR 0.36 per share, corresponding to approximately 71% of the operating result of 2025.

We continued our determined efforts around sustainability and achieved excellent results. We made progress in the short-term science-based climate targets according to plan. Customer satisfaction remained stable and our efforts in loss prevention and risk management solutions enhanced the well-being and safety of our customers. At the same time, good governance group's internal risk management and predictive sustainability work showed in our full year results. We report on our sustainability efforts in our website and in our sustainability statement. We encourage all shareholders to read the sustainability statement, which gives a more detailed account of the progress made in 2025 and its impact.

A few words about the Board work last year. The Board convened 11 times last year. The attendance rate was approximately 100, almost 100. The Board members are highly committed to their job and their wide and diverse expertise and long experience benefits the company in many ways. We will deal with the election of Board members later on in this meeting. We propose that the number of Board members be confirmed at 8 and that Andreas Brandstetter be elected as a new Board member. He will introduce himself later on in that particular agenda item. Our long-term Board member, Christian Clausen, has announced that he is no longer available for reelection.

And in this -- at this point, I would like to warmly thank Christian for his valuable work done for the company during 10 years in the Board of Directors. Thank you, Christian. Finally, on behalf of myself and the entire Board of Directors, I would like to thank all of you, shareholders for trusting us last year. And with these words, I declare the Annual General Meeting opened.

And the next point on the agenda is calling the meeting to order, and I propose that according to -- in accordance with the organizational documents, the meeting be chaired by Attorney at Law Mikko Heinonen and the Secretary of the meeting.

Thank you, Chairman. Dear shareholders, dear Sampo Board and dear colleagues as well. On my behalf as well, I warmly welcome to the Annual General Meeting for 2026 for Sampo Group. It is also my very first AGM as Sampo CEO. As I'm speaking largely to a Finnish audience, please accept my apologies for my limited vocabulary in Finnish. For that reason, I will be giving this presentation in English.

As Antti mentioned, I took the helm of Sampo last year after my predecessor, Torbjorn Magnusson, decided to retire from his role. I'm deeply honored by this opportunity. Having been with Sampo Group now for more than 20 years, I have witnessed the remarkable evolution firsthand and of course, are truly excited about leading this next chapter in our history. In a world of risks and uncertainty, Sampo provides safety, stability and value through understanding and mitigating risks. As a group, we create value for our customers through modern insurance operations under several brands and thereby also create value for our shareholders.

Before diving into last year's operational performance, if you let me showcase our position and strengths as a company and investment case. As a modern pure-play P&C insurer, Sampo has a truly unique position. Starting from the fact that we are the leading P&C insurance group in the Northern Europe, we serve around 9 million customers in 8 markets through our strong and trusted customer brands. Our scale enable us to provide excellent insurance products and services in a cost-efficient manner and at the same time, benefit from diversification so that we can deliver attractive and stable financial results.

Our scale also makes us into an attractive partner. This, for example, includes partnership with multiple leading car brands that not only give us a great distribution network, but also valuable insight into technology development when it comes to, for instance, electrical vehicles or even the future autonomous vehicles.

Sampo is also the most diversified insurer in our region. In addition to scale benefits, having a large diversified portfolio is key in insurance as it reduces volatility. This means that our performance can be more stable and more predictable compared to players that are heavily exposed to one single country or one single region. In the Nordics, we are a clear market leader. However, we are not #1 in any of our single markets, meaning that there's plenty of room for stable long-term organic growth. And offering organic growth is what Sampo is all about. I'll get back to the different growth drivers in a minute. But as you see on the pie chart here on the right-hand side, we have multiple -- or left-hand side, I guess it's for you. We have multiple attractive areas where we see structural growth and also attractive areas where we see more cyclical growth.

Now let's take a look at last year's financial performance. 2025 was yet an excellent year for Sampo, underpinned by strong top line growth and maintained solid margins. We saw 8% top line growth, leading to a 13% growth in the underwriting result. Combined with solid investment return, our operating earnings per share or operating EPS in short, increased by 7%. As you see from the table here, our reported EPS increased by 65%. This was supported by the significant gain of EUR 540 million on our NBA investments. This investment gain is not included in the operating EPS, which then better represent the underlying operational performance of the group. Thus, this also explains the large difference between the 7% operating EPS and the reported 65% growth in reported EPS.

Our balance sheet remained robust with solvency and financial leverage ratios being in line with our targets. Strong operational performance, combined with a resilient balance enabled the Sampo Board to propose a 6% increase in the regular dividend per share for 2025. But more about capital distribution a little bit later in my presentation.

The underwriting profit, which is the main profit driver for Sampo and shows how much of the insurance revenue remains after deducting claims costs and other insurance operational costs increased by 13%. This was actually the third consecutive year with exactly 13% growth in the underwriting profit. While I would like to attribute this to our razor sharp precision, it's fair to attribute this more to excellent diversification across markets and segments. Nevertheless, over this 3-year period, we have produced more than 40% cumulative growth in the insurance service result.

In 2025, we have some called good luck from benign weather and also from fewer large claims than what we had anticipated. Although in insurance, we don't really talk about luck, but rather about stochastic deviations from an expected norm. Yet as you can see, the primary driver for the underwriting result growth was our organic premium growth. And this is what the Sampo equity story is all about, maintaining attractive insurance margins while seizing attractive growth opportunities through leveraging our scale, leading market position, superior pricing sophistication and best-in-class digital capabilities.

Now let's look closer at what were the main drivers behind our solid top line growth. In the Nordics, the fastest growing product area over the last couple of years has been personal insurances. This includes products such as health, accident and child insurances. Today, we are insuring more than 1 million customers with health insurances across the Nordics. Due to the quite comprehensive public health care systems we have in the Nordics, the market penetration of personal insurance products is still relatively low compared to Western countries.

However, the demand is increasing because of demographic changes, wealth accumulation and also a pressure on public health care. Hence, we see a great potential in future growth in this area going forward, driven both by increased demand and also supported by our excellent cross-selling capabilities.

Another example of growth in the Nordics is the SME segment, for us defined as companies with less than 50 employees. This sector represents the majority of our commercial client portfolio. And in 2025, we achieved a 7% like-for-like top line growth in this area and added some 3,200 new customers.

Moving to our digital U.K. business, which has been a significant contributor to our organic growth. We also there see very good growth momentum throughout 2025. Since the acquisition of Hastings in 2020, we have added around 1.5 million customers to our book in the U.K., out of which 600,000 in 2025 alone. While we see attractive growth potential in the U.K. in the long term, I'd like to remind you that due to different market dynamics, the U.K. market is more cyclical than the Nordic market, meaning short-term volatility is more normal. We, of course, always act in a disciplined manner in our underwriting and manage growth according to the different cycles.

Turning then to one of Sampo's core strengths and an important driver of our compelling organic growth, namely digital -- our digital capabilities. This is again something that's amplified by our scale and our pan-Nordic operating model.

Sampo has been a digital pioneer in the Nordics, beginning our investments in online distribution some 20 years ago. Today, we see that those investments bear fruit as our digital capabilities continue to drive growth as well as efficiency. In 2025, we saw 15% growth in digital sales in our Nordic retail business, and we achieved our operational ambition for this metric 1 year ahead of plan.

Similarly, we saw the same growth rate in our commercial -- Nordic commercial business, where we see that SME customers, in particular, are following the same path in adopting digital service channels as retail customers. Having market-leading digital capabilities means faster and easier-to-use services for our customers and enable cost efficiency improvements that benefit both our customers and our shareholders. Use of AI, of course, is a very hot topic these days. While some sectors may see it as a threat, we see it as a great opportunity. Insurance is at large a digital and highly data-driven industry with a high number of customer journeys that could be automated.

Consequently, the industry should be well positioned to take advantage of new technology such as AI. However, only the digitally advanced companies are ready to harvest these benefits and Sampo is certainly one of them. Although I also would like to highlight that AI for us is not something new. It's not really even a separate thing for us. It's just the next step in our technological development in which we have consistently invested.

Moving then to Denmark and commenting on the Topdanmark integration. In 2024, we completed our transformation into a unified pure-play P&C insurance group by acquiring the rest of Topdanmark. And in 2025, we are focused on integrating it into our pan-Nordic operating model. The integration process is progressing at full speed and the benefits are already materializing.

Last spring, we -- as we got more detailed insight into the business, we increased our run rate synergy estimate for 2028 up to EUR 140 million, up from the original estimate of EUR 95 million. By the end of 2025, we have already achieved run rate synergies of EUR 37 million, exceeding our original plan of EUR 24 million, although the faster-than-planned progress appears largely attributable to timing. Most of the synergies come from the cost side through such as overlapping corporate center functions and IT systems. But we are now starting also to see clear benefits on the revenue side as well.

In 2025, our substantially strengthened position in Denmark enabled us to sign multiple new distribution agreements with car brands. Combining 2 large organizations is, of course, never easy as changes can naturally create uncertainty, both among employees and customers. Therefore, I'm very proud of our organization and how they have adapted to this change and proactively seized the opportunities. This gives me a strong confidence for our future development in Denmark.

While the underwriting result is our main profit driver, we also aim to achieve attractive investment returns with manageable risks on top of that. As for most P&C insurers, the majority of our investment portfolio is allocated to fixed income instruments that generates stable, predictable recurring income and do not tie up too much capital.

At the same time, we like to have a certain exposure to equities. This help us match our liabilities with longer durations. But more importantly, it also provides attractive return in the longer term. As our track record shows, this has been a good strategy. Over the last 17 years or so, we have achieved more than 4% investment return on average, clearly exceeding the return if we would have just have invested in low-risk, low-return government bonds. Last year, the investment return were, of course, exceptionally high and largely driven by our investment in Nova, which was listed in September. Nova has been a good investment for Sampo as our original investment of EUR 325 million back in the days have more than doubled. As this is what we call a legacy asset made during the old strategy, we will eventually sell our stake, but of course, in a controlled manner.

2025 again was an excellent year for Sampo, and our performance have been well in line with our financial targets set for the strategic period 2024 to 2026. As 2026 then is the last year of our current strategic period, we have already started preparing our operational and financial ambitions for the next one. Therefore, we will host an investor update on the 17th of November this year, where we will provide further insight into our new strategic period.

I'm confident that 2026 will be yet another good year for Sampo as we continue to leverage our scale and unique capabilities across segments and geographies. We have set an outlook for the full year, expecting 5% to 8% top line growth and up to 8% growth in the underwriting result. The outlook is in line with our main financial target of achieving more than 9% growth in the operating EPS on average for the period 2024 to 2026.

Shifting from earning capital to returning it to you, our shareholders. As Antti already highlighted in his opening speech, we recently updated our distribution policy. Sampo aims to pay a reliable and progressive regular dividend and the proposed dividend per share of EUR 0.36 is exactly in line with this. With continued strong performance, you can expect a steady increase in the regular dividends.

And we plan to maintain a historic -- a growth that is in line with historic trajectory, where we then slightly reduce the payout ratio over time. The regular dividend will be complemented with share buybacks, which will support our EPS, but also our dividend per share development.

Going forward, the capital for buybacks will mainly be generated from our operational business, but there is still some excess capital expected to be released as we continue to sell down our legacy assets. As communicated in connection with the full-year results, we will review and comment on our excess capital position in connection with the Q1 results that is published on the 6th of May.

To conclude my presentation, I'm very pleased with Sampo's performance in 2025. These achievements were made possible by our more than 15,000 employees who together with trusted partners are dedicated to creating value for our customers and thereby also for our shareholders.

I would like to thank our employees, our customers, partners and all shareholders for your continued support. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sampo Group's Conference Call on Full Year 2025 Results. My name is Mirko Hurmerinta, Investor Relations Manager at Sampo. I'm joined on the call by Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud; Group CFO, Knut-Arne Alsaker; and Lars Kufall Beck, Group CFO as of the beginning of April.

The call will include a short presentation by Morten and Lars, followed by Q&A. A recording of the call will later be available at sampo.com.

With that, I hand over to Morten. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Mirko, and warmly welcome from my side as well. Sampo delivered another strong year in 2025, marked by consistent execution, robust profitability and solid momentum across our Private and SME segments. We achieved a like-for-like growth of 8%, combined with disciplined underwriting, a benign claims environment and continued efficiency gains, supported even by Topdanmark synergies. This resulted in an underwriting profit of EUR 1.5 billion.

Our Investment portfolio also performed strongly, driven by both NOBA's contribution and solid returns from the regular investment portfolio. Operating EPS reached EUR 0.50, and the Board has proposed a regular dividend of EUR 0.36 per share, a 6% increase year-on-year. Sampo remains committed to delivering substantial value to its shareholders, and today, we also announced an adjustment to our distribution policy, which Lars will elaborate on shortly.

Our underwriting results grew by 13%, actually for the third consecutive year, representing then more than 40% cumulative growth over this period. The main driver of this performance has been organic growth with consistent strong momentum in our Private and SME segments. I will return to the Private business shortly.

In SME, customer adoption of digital services is following the same pattern as we've seen in the retail market, exactly as anticipated and planned for. As a result, top line growth has accelerated. SME premiums grew by 7% in 2025 compared to 5% in 2024 and 4% in 2023. Last year, we added more than 3,200 new commercial customers, predominantly SMEs, while maintaining high and stable retention.

Part of the underwriting improvement reflects favorable weather and large claims outcomes, but the underlying trend remains strong. We continue to offset claims inflation through disciplined pricing. 2025 was also the first year of delivering synergies from integrating Topdanmark into our pan-Nordic platform. We achieved run rate synergies of EUR 37 million, ahead of the original EUR 24 million target for the year, though largely due to timing effects. We remain firmly committed to our EUR 140 million target for 2028. However, now, of course, with increased confidence.

Let's turn to our Retail business, beginning then with Private Nordic. Private Nordic has delivered strong and sustained growth, and the momentum throughout 2025 reinforces the competitive strength of our modern remote distribution model. Like-for-like growth reached approximately 9%, with solid performance across all major product lines.

Personal Insurance continued to stand out, growing 11%, as we added 30,000 new insured individuals in 2025. The outlook in this area remains highly positive, supported by rising demand for services that complement public healthcare. In digital sales, we reached our operational target of EUR 175 million 1 year ahead of schedule, demonstrating the increasing significance of this channel. Our digital capabilities, combined with our scale and technical expertise, also reinforce our position in partnership channels.

In 2025, we renewed all major partnerships across all markets, including in the Swedish mobility sector. This underscores our position as the preferred partner to the automotive industry and provides valuable insight into motor industry trends. It's particularly encouraging to see that we also secured 4 new mobility agreements in Denmark, reflecting how our strengthened position in the market is now transforming our ability to compete for and win new partnerships.

Turning then to Private UK. In 2025, we delivered 13% like-for-like premium growth, supported by a 16% increase in policy count. However, motor pricing continued to soften throughout the year. While we have captured the growth opportunities available to us, we have also scaled back activity in line with market pricing trends. This was reflected in a slower policy growth trajectory in the second half of the year.

We continue to view the U.K. market as rational, but achieving our target margins has naturally become more challenging in the current pricing environment. Despite this, we remain highly confident in our long-term prospects in the U.K. In recent years, we have consistently demonstrated our ability to balance growth and profitability, and we are continuing to invest in proprietary data, pricing sophistication and enhanced digital capabilities. Underwriting discipline remains paramount, for example. We will continue to target business in the U.K. that fits within our 88% to 90% combined ratio ambition. In the softer phase of the cycle, this means operating more towards the upper end of the range.

With that, moving from the insurance operations to investments and the balance sheet, and I'll hand over to Lars to comment a little bit on that.

Thank you so much, Morten. In 2025, Sampo delivered a strong investment income on the back of strong returns across both fixed income and equities. Our fixed income portfolio continued to provide a stable interest income, also slightly down year-on-year. The mark-to-market yield is still slightly below the running yield, which implies that a small further reduction is expected in 2026, assuming, of course, no material swings in the interest rate environment. However, the main driver for our strong investment income in 2025 and for the fourth quarter as well was our stake in NOBA. Following the successful IPO of NOBA, we saw a EUR 540 million gain, of which EUR 173 million came in Q4. Beyond NOBA, equities in our portfolio performed well in 2025, where we continue to benefit from being exposed to this asset class.

If we look ahead into 2026 in terms of investment strategy, we are being quite cautious about deploying new money at this point in time, given the tight spreads, high equity valuations and the geopolitical uncertainty we see.

Talking about capital generation and capital management, Sampo runs a highly cash-generative business and a very strong balance sheet. Our solvency stood at 174% at year-end, but it is cast on a very strong basis with the symmetric adjustment materially higher than a year ago and with benefits from further NOBA sell-downs and the Danish partial internal model change to come.

In total, Sampo generated EUR 1.5 billion of deployable capital in 2025, bringing our cumulative capital generation in the strategic period to date to EUR 3.5 billion. This puts us well on track for the more than EUR 5.5 billion target we have set for the 2024 to 2026 period.

In 2026, we see deployable capital generation being driven mainly by our operating profits. But on top of that, we do have effects from the partial internal model for Denmark and potential NOBA sell-down. The regulatory process around the Danish partial internal model has taken a little bit longer than originally anticipated. However, nothing has changed with the estimated EUR 60 million to EUR 90 million SCR benefit expected, in which we remain very confident.

On NOBA, we are currently in a lock up, but we will, of course, look for opportunities to sell down our stake further, assuming we can do so at an attractive valuation. When it comes to buybacks, funded by disposals, in our last Capital Markets Day, we said that we would distribute up to EUR 500 million, which means that there is EUR 350 million to go after the latest buyback. Beyond that, we will take a closer look at the excess capital position when that times come. Remember, we want to maintain a very strong balance sheet with a solid liquidity buffer in our holdco.

Shifting from capital generation to capital distribution. This morning, we announced an update to our distribution policy, enabling us to provide an attractive mix of dividends and share buybacks going forward. Firstly, it's important to note that this affects only the mix of capital returns, not the total amount of capital to be returned to shareholders. We stay committed to a very strong capital discipline, where we, in a normal year, expect to return around 90% of our operating result to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

Secondly, Sampo remains committed to distribute a reliable and progressive regular dividend. And in a normal year, the majority of our operating results will continue to be redistributed through dividends, but effectively, we are lowering the dividend payout ratio floor from 70% to 60%. We believe buybacks offer an efficient way to invest in our steadily growing business, and we know that a lot of our shareholders agree with this. At the same time, we continue to offer growing progressive dividends for more income-oriented investors. Looking ahead, we aim to grow the regular dividend broadly in line with the EUR 0.02 annual increase that you have seen since 2020.

That's all from my side for now, and back to you, Morten.

Good. So looking ahead to 2026, we expect the strong trends across our business to continue. Organic growth will remain the primary driver of underwriting profit, and we maintain a positive outlook. We guide for insurance revenue in the range of EUR 9.5 billion to EUR 9.8 billion, corresponding to 5% to 8% growth. In areas where competition is tightening, such as the U.K. and large corporate segment, you can continue to expect disciplined execution from us.

On margins, the planned 40 basis points improvement in the Nordic operating cost ratio is expected to be the main driver of profitability. Our outlook on underwriting result is set to EUR 1,485 million to EUR 1,600 million. As always, our outlook is set with an element of caution. The lower end of the range reflects uncertainty related to weather conditions, including a somewhat harsh winter to date and potentially spillover impact from the storm Johannes that occurred late in 2026.

Overall, I'm very pleased with Sampo's performance in 2025 and the momentum that we carry into 2026. This gives me strong confidence in our ability to continue delivering excellent results and shareholder value.

Thank you, Morten and Lars. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from David Barma from Bank of America.

Firstly, on the U.K., please. Could you run us through the drivers of the deterioration in the margin in the quarter? And to what extent the weather impacted this, please?

And then secondly, staying on the U.K., policy count growth seems to have accelerated in motor in Q4. Can you explain how you see the balance today between margin and volume? And maybe if you could give us some indication as to how pricing has developed since the end of the year when I think we were still seeing double-digit average pricing drop year-on-year?

And then lastly, a more theoretical question. A big topic so far this year has been the increased threats of the faster growth in self-driving vehicles and trials appear to have been particularly focused on your market, so the U.K. and the Nordics until now. Would you be able to share your thoughts on this and how the Sampo Group might be preparing for a faster evolving auto insurance market landscape than maybe we realized?

Good. So 3 large questions in a way at the very start here. First, to the U.K. margins. Fourth quarter is, of course, a quarter where we move a little bit into winter-type effects also in the U.K. So it's natural to see a little bit increase in frequency in the fourth quarter. We are landing firmly within our range -- operating ratio range with 89.2% for the full year. But again, fourth quarter, naturally a little bit more motor claims due to weather. Then, there is also a small impact from us strengthening reserves a little bit on the home side. There's been a bit of subsidence claims in the U.K. in 2025, and we wanted to be sure that we had as conservative reserves on the home side, as we have on the rest of the business. So we also added a little bit there in the fourth quarter.

When it comes to policy count and pricing development, policy growth came down clearly in the U.K. during the year. So fairly strong in Q1, coming down then a little bit in Q2. And Q3, Q4 being clearly softer in terms of policy growth, but we still continued to see a growth in also number of policies. Obviously, the reason for growth coming down is, again, that prices have come down over the last year, more so in the first half of 2025. And then second half of '25 has been more a sideways movement. And that is, broadly speaking, also the situation that we see now in the beginning of '26. Always important to, I think, underline that this is quite a rational behavior from the market. Pricing was clearly overshooting a bit towards the end of 2024. So it's quite a rational and natural move in the market.

And when it comes to autonomous vehicles, one can spend hours debating this. Perhaps some few reflections. First of all, safer cars, safer roads is, of course, nothing new. Over the last 15 years or so, we've seen a 40% to 60% decrease in fatalities in the Nordic region, which means that we have -- which, of course, is a very good development for the society as such. And also, for us, where we've seen a sharp reduction in bodily injury claims. And at the same time, this has been more than offset by an increase in frequency, and in particular, severity on the small- and medium-sized claims. And we see this in particular with newer cars. Cars with a lot of technology are far more expensive to repair than cars without, of course, this technology.

If you see -- look at the market, like Norway, for instance, where you have 30% of the fleet now being fully EVs, we see that the repair cost of those are significantly higher than the repair cost of the older cars. And perhaps one should underline is nothing -- it's not really driven by the fact that these are EVs, but it's driven more by the fact that these are modern cars with a lot of technology.

With autonomous vehicles, one could expect that claims frequency, when it comes to collisions, of course, could come down. Then, one should bear in mind that collision is just one of the items that we cover. Looking again at Norwegian statistics, collision claims account for about 30% of claims cost, which means about 20% of claims -- of premiums. And there are a lot of other claims types. That one, of course, need to bear in mind, and that is not affected by reduced frequency on the collision side.

Then, I think also, one need to just bear in mind that with the new cars with more technology, you need to repair them to a larger degree than before. So if you had a small damage on your bumper in an old car, you didn't really need to repair it or you could just do some paint work. In the new cars, and of course, in the future autonomous vehicles, you need to repair these damages, and you need to repair them throughout the lifetime of the car. So I think there are sort of many effects here one can debate.

I think we look upon this as an exciting and good opportunity for us because I think this will somehow differentiate between the excellent players. Motor insurance is becoming a more complex type of business now with all of this technology and with large variations in repair costs on different models.

So perhaps a long answer, but I wanted to sort of give you a little bit also on the context around this.

Yes, that's very helpful.

The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

I had 2 questions. One was just on the Nordic region and more specifically, in Norway. Would love to understand how much of a pricing benefit do you continue to see in Norway, one? But then in general, are you able to talk to us a little bit about how do you plan to grow in the broader Nordic region? And where is the growth in top line going to come from? That's the first one.

The second one, just circling back to the U.K. a little bit, trying to understand your sort of targets versus your margin guidance. So obviously, you have the 20% to 25% CAGR underwriting result target that you have, but now with margins worsening, should we be a bit more sort of flexible on that? Or would you continue to be more flexible on that? Or how would you meet that target? It would just be great to understand that.

And sorry, if I could just squeeze in a third one, just a little bit on your investment. In the past, I remember you had spoken about re-risking in Topdanmark. Is that still something you would look to do?

Yes, I'll start with the Nordic region and pricing. We continue to have a situation where price increases are clearly higher in Norway compared to the other countries. Coming down a little bit over the last couple of quarters, but still clearly being higher in Norway compared to the other countries. Then, also pricing overall in the Nordics is still on a somewhat elevated level. So we definitely see support on the topline from price actions still throughout the Nordics.

When it comes to growth in the Nordics in the future, our expectation is that it's quite broad-based. We have an excellent competitive position, and what I would say, a superior operating model in the private segment, a highly digital, modern operating model that I expect that we should be able to capitalize on going forward as, again, the market is gradually becoming more and more digital.

We have an excellent position in the mobility market, where we many times have talked about the Swedish market in particular that should represent a good growth opportunity for us when that market is turning and Swedes are starting to buy cars again. We have built up also a very competitive distribution service model in SME. So that is also a good opportunity for us. And then we continue to point out sort of the personal insurance market as a market with strong underlying growth, where we continue to see double-digit growth and maybe we continue to have good outlook for the future. So it's quite broad-based when it comes to the growth expectations in the Nordics.

Then, on the U.K. margin, I'm not sure if I fully got your question. Yes, perhaps, Knut-Arne, if you...

Sure, Morten. Morten alluded to the operating range that we want to have in the U.K., 88% to 90%, and indicated that where we are today with pricing, it's more likely that it's going to be in the upper end than the lower end of that range, which again then translate into the operating ambition we have for the U.K., which is a 20% to 25% average growth in the underwriting profit. And with that condition and the upper end of the combined ratio range for '26, we still confirm the 20% to 25% average underwriting profit growth, but it will be reasonable to assume that it would be more in the lower end than the upper end of that particular range.

Good. So hopefully that was clear. And then, you had a question on derisking in Topdanmark. We're not doing any derisking, not in the Topdanmark portfolio, nor sort of in any other parts of our business. We did quite a lot of derisking in industrial and partially also in commercial throughout, yes, second half of 2024 and well into and throughout 2025. But that process is now concluded. So no further plans of doing any derisking, not in the Topdanmark portfolio or for the previous Topdanmark portfolio nor elsewhere in the business.

I'm sorry. So just on the Topdanmark bit, so my question was actually more related to the investment portfolio in Topdanmark. I remember, I think it was last quarter or the quarter prior, you were talking about actually increasing your allocation to corporate credit or higher-risk investments. So I'm just curious, do you still plan to do that with the Topdanmark investment portfolio? Or is that no longer the case given what you've already said about the spreads in the market and the geopolitical uncertainty, et cetera? Sorry, that was my question around Topdanmark.

All right. It's Knut-Arne here again. I'll take that on investments. That is still the plan. We're slowly, but gradually changing the fixed income portfolio away from Danish covered bonds to high grade, not necessarily high-risk corporate euro as well fixed income instruments. That's a process that started, but not completed. And one of the reasons for that is that we don't want to rush into that transition by buying assets at prices that we think are too high. So it's still the plan, and it started. I wouldn't necessarily say that, that is re-risking at large our fixed income portfolio, and it's not a process which will significantly change in any way the capital we deploy to market risk.

The next question comes from Hans Rettedal Christiansen from Danske Bank.

So I had a few questions. Maybe first just starting on the premium growth expectations for 2026. And sort of elaborating a little bit on the overall guidance that you're giving, specifically interested to hear what sort of Swedish new car sales that you're embedding in the overall guidance for 2026?

And secondly, also if you're still confident in the sort of over 10% growth overall for the Nordic region that you said in Q3?

Yes. Premium growth, as we indicated with the outlook, we expect insurance revenue to grow with 5% to 10%. So I think that gives an indication on our growth expectations overall. And I think, as we have alluded to, more favorable development in the Nordic region than in the U.K., at least now in the very beginning of 2026.

When it comes to Swedish new car sales, we have not put any significant increase in our sort of base assumption, so, of course, again, if new car sales is picking up, that could be an upside for us, but we have expected a rather stable situation sort of when creating the plan. Yes.

Just a quick one. Hans, it's Mirko here. The 10% you are referring in Q3, that is the ambition for Personal Insurance, not Private Nordic.

Got it. And then just to follow up on it, can you maybe just elaborate a bit on the sort of what is your assumptions underlying the kind of 5% to 10% range given that it's quite wide?

Well, of course, again, a large proportion of this will continue to come from price increases. But we do expect to see also a certain growth in number of customers. We saw a growth in number of customers both in private and commercial throughout 2025. We continue to expect that. And then, again, as Mirko alluded to, of course, more growth in certain parts of the business, like personal risk products, where we see consistently growth above 10% now for quite a long period, and we expect that to also continue into 2026.

And if I should just add to Morten's comment, Hans, I think you asked for the range in the insurance revenue outlook. It's, of course, the beginning of the year, where we think it's reasonable to have a slightly wider range in the outlook than what we usually end up with at the end of the year for natural reasons. And one of the drivers for that range and the lower end of that range is what Morten alluded to earlier also in his introduction in terms of staying disciplined, not least in the U.K. market. So pricing development in the U.K. market will also impact where we -- as one factor where we end up in that range towards the end of the year.

Got it. That's very helpful. And just 2 final ones, quick ones on the updates that you're planning for Q1, both on capital and synergies. So on the first one on the update on distribution policy, how do you plan on sort of the timing of share buybacks throughout the year in this sort of updated policy? And is it also so that excess capital is still going to be distributed in the form of share buybacks in this policy?

And then, on the synergy update that you're planning in Q1, just looking at the Slide #12 in the presentation, the wording is sort of a phasing of synergies that you want to update on. So should we take this to mean that you're sort of -- you haven't seen any more synergies or potential for synergies, but more so that it's kind of 2028 synergies coming earlier than expected?

Yes. I'll hand the one on capital and buybacks to Lars, and then, I can comment on the synergies after that. So Lars please go ahead.

Yes. Thanks a lot. On your question about timing and update of the policy, as we are saying, we will revert this year in connection with our Q1 results, i.e., in May. And we expect actually also going forward to do that at that point in time. We believe that is the right time in the year. It will allow us to do potential buybacks after the ex-dividend period. I think what we are confirming here is our strict -- as I said, initially, our strict capital discipline that we will return in a normal year 90% of the operating profit to our shareholders with a split that is potentially a little bit different from the past, lowering the floor from dividends from 70% to 60%, but confirming and reconfirming the majority come as dividend, and then, an option to do share buybacks on top of that. But as I said, important to stress our commitment to delivering a progressive dividend going forward as well.

Then, on the synergy update, as you all have seen, we are reporting EUR 37 million in run rate synergies realized already at the end of 2025, which is well ahead of the plan that was EUR 24 million at the end of 2025. So we are front-loading the synergy capture quite a bit, and we thought that it would make sense to update on sort of the timing of the synergies, again, in connection with the Q1 result. We still remain committed and believe in the EUR 140 million in total synergies. But again, obviously, we have been able to realize the synergies somewhat quicker than anticipated.

The next question comes from Ulrik Zurcher from Nordea.

Just wondering one clarification I have. The base case, should that be an improvement in the underlying risk ratio in the Nordics in '26, just given all the pricing actions and still relatively hard market?

And then question number two, I think you described the low-end risk of your underwriting result outlook quite well. But what would be some key factors needed to hit the higher end of that outlook?

Yes. When it comes to combined ratio improvement, the main driver on the combined ratio, I remember that you asked about the risk ratio, but the combined ratio is still the 40 basis points efficiency improvement in the Nordic cost ratio. And we indicated that is expected to be also the main driver of underlying profitability going forward, alluding then to perhaps a somewhat smaller risk ratio improvements. We produced a 30 basis points risk ratio improvement this year. But expect that to come somewhat down, and we expect, again, the combined ratio more to be supported by the cost ratio improvement with the 40 basis points.

When it comes to the outlook, in a way, you could say on the insurance result, we have produced a 13% growth now 3 consecutive years. However, one should bear in mind that there was a benign large claims and weather situation in 2025. And if you shave off that, then the outlook is actually consistent with 5% to 13% increase in insurance service results. The upper part of that, of course, would assume that we have, again, a favorable -- somewhat favorable development in large claims and also in weather. And, of course, then the lower end would assume the opposite. This is after all insurance, and we are after all still exposed to large claims and weather.

Yes. That makes sense. And just on the underlying risk ratio or underlying, as you said, because it's very hard to picture that we won't see an improvement in private lines, for example, given all the repricing that's been going on. Is that correct? Is this more of a commercial or industrial segment where it could be more difficult to improve the risk ratio?

I think could be the situation. I think, obviously, sort of U.K. now, I mean, if you start there, a little bit softer. We indicated that we still stick to our 88% to 90% operating ratio target, but perhaps in the soft market, you operate more towards the upper end of that. Then, yes, we've seen very good development in private, also SME, where we've seen good underlying improvement. And then also on the large corporate side, it's a little bit softer market. So I think it's reasonable to expect that more positive sort of view on private SME and a bit more cautious view on large corporate and the U.K.

The next question comes from Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB.

Jaakko from SEB. I would like to follow up on the discussion on SSD or autonomous driving possible market disruption going forward. What are you seeing as a kind of a key barrier entries for possible new competition in your home markets? And how you are seeing Sampo positioning in terms of your very good digital capabilities versus the so-called pure-play digital players that you see outside your home markets?

Yes. I think to put it very simply, the main barrier of entry when it comes to motor is that all of these cars need to be repaired. It's a very physical operation in reality. So if you want to insure cars in the Nordics or in the U.K., you need to be able to handle all of the damages, all of the repair throughout the entire region. You need to provide roadside assistance, you need to sort of provide services sort of changing in screens. You need to repair the collisions and so forth and so forth. So I think sometimes people forget about that, that although a large part of the insurance industry is digital, also a very large part of it is highly physical, and that, in particular, goes for motor. So I think regardless of how the insurances are distributed, you basically need a service on the ground that to me will very much look and smell like an insurance company to put it like that.

Excellent. All of my other questions have been already asked.

The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca.

My one main question would be on this new dividend policy or new payout policy. I mean, isn't it usually that the market looks as a dividend as a signal, which you're more committed and -- not you, but our company is more committed to and buybacks being more flexible? Could you just talk a little bit about why you felt the need to bring in a little bit more flexibility within the same, say, 90% payout approach? So that's my first question.

Second question is just on the Nordics and the autonomous vehicle debate. I mean, is -- we've seen obviously 2 forces. One is the new car sales falling for many years, which have changed the -- have kind of increased the fleet age, but also lots of new adoption by customers. So do you see that there is a risk here that the adoption of new autonomous vehicles could be much faster even though the price point might be higher, of course? So just curious what you think about the adoption rate of customers to new autonomous vehicles?

Yes. I'll leave to Lars to debate a little bit about the dividend policy, and then, I can ponder a bit around the AVs again.

Yes, absolutely. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the question. I think, again, reiterating that what we are changing here is merely a potential floor for the dividend payout ratio. We reconfirm and confirm that we want to and aim to deliver a progressive, stable, growing dividend over time that then represents at least this 60% of operating profits. Lowering the floor simply gives us the opportunity and the flexibility to ensure that we can deliver that. And that's basically why we're doing it to ensure that 70% doesn't become a constraint and that we continue to deliver an attractive capital redistribution to shareholders in the form of dividends -- ordinary dividends and buybacks.

Good. And when it comes to adoption of new car and new technology in the Nordic motor industry, I think it's a rather scattered picture in a way. When we talk about low new car sales, we are then pointing at Sweden. If you then look to a country like Norway, the new car sales has been very high for a number of years now with a very high adoption of new technology, and in particular, EVs.

So if you look at 2025, more than 95% of all new passenger cars were fully EVs in Norway. And if you look at the stock, more than 30% of the stock of passenger cars in Norway are now EVs. So in that market, that leads us to be in a quick adoption of new technology. So it's quite a different situation from market to market. Obviously, the Norwegian situation has been fueled by incentives given by sort of -- through sort of lowering taxes on the EVs compared to other cars. So I think it's hard to say something about adoption rates of new cars, new technology.

I think for us, again, it's more underlying that I think that we're well positioned to handle this. And again, that the trend that we see is making motor insurance actually a little bit more complicated, and again, favors the big players that have a lot of data, a lot of insight and that can act in a smart way in a landscape that is changing. So for us, we look upon this as a good opportunity to really utilize our skills in full.

The next question comes from Michele Ballatore from KBW.

I mean, they are both on the new capital management policies -- policy. I'm sorry, but I'm quite confused. I mean, so you have a 90% payout as a target of your operating earnings. And you are referring to 70% on the dividend. I believe this is the cash portion of the dividend. And you said that you don't want this to become a constraint, but why should this be a constraint? I mean, can you maybe help me understanding the dynamics here? So this is the first.

The second question is about the operating EPS growth target. I mean, obviously -- I mean, we're going to see the -- let's say, the share count dropping a little bit more than expected now. So how should we think about this 9%? I mean, is this 9% -- how much of share buyback are included in your mind on this target? Or should we assume there is probably upside to the EPS -- operating EPS from this?

Yes. If I take the first one, thanks, I think the whole idea for us is to deliver a dividend per share that is secure and gradually growing while we leave a little bit more headroom for doing share buybacks to be funded by our operating earnings in the future and not just the one-offs like the asset sale that we have done over the recent year. We believe that makes sure that we have a mix of capital return that's attractive to our shareholder base. And if you assume that earnings developed nicely, you can expect our dividend to grow in a very similar way to what it has done over the recent years if we have -- where we have increased the dividend per share by EUR 0.02 per year for 5 consecutive years now.

And should we have a bad year, we do aim to keep the EPS stable. So that, in other words, means that we aim to have a progressive dividend of at least 60% of operating earnings and then top that up with potential buybacks. And whether it's 70% this year, it's a payout ratio of 71%, 70% plus/minus, has not been an option with the historical policy that we have had, and that's why we're doing the change. But as I said, and we are pretty clear on our guidance that our plan is to grow dividend in a very similar way to what you have seen over the last few years.

Yes. And then, on the operating EPS growth, yes, our target for the period 2024 to 2026, so this strategic period, is above 9% for the period, annual growth. We, of course, do expect some buybacks in this year. But we also said that we will come back to more information about that after Q1. But of course, as you all understand, there is still a bit of capital to be distributed from the 2025 earnings. And then also sort of we need to look into other sources for capital redistribution and to be used that by buybacks. Again, we'll get back to that in Q1, sort of where we can give a more firm answer on it.

The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

Just one quick question on something you mentioned. So you were saying you expect some drag from the large corporate or the industrial segment. Are you able to share with us what kind of price decreases you saw in that book at the 1/1 renewals? So just trying to get a sense of how much do you think -- how much we should think that will impact your risk ratio?

No, I think we definitely didn't use the word drag. I think we continue to expect excellent profitability also in the large corporate segment. However, I think the comment was more about underlying improvements. We delivered a strong combined ratio for the large corporate segment in 2025 and expect to be able to do so also in 2026. Of course, always bearing in mind that this part of the business is a little bit more exposed to large claims.

And then, the comment was more about price increases, that price increases in the large corporate segment. That market is definitely a little bit softer. So it's not reasonable to believe strong underlying improvement, but that's not -- that's absolutely not the same as saying that it will be a drag. We continue to expect solid profitability on the large corporate side.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

All right. Thank you very much. That concludes the call for today. Thank you for listening in.

Dear all, I'm Morten Thorsrud, CEO of Sampo Group. The result from 2025 confirms that our organic growth strategy continues to deliver. Sampo is benefiting from scale, strong market positions and the investments we have made in digital sales and service capabilities. 2025 was another year of strong and consistent execution. Solid top line growth across our private and SME businesses, combined with disciplined margin management resulted in a 13% increase in reported underwriting profit.

This was the third consecutive year of 13% growth, driving a total increase of 44% over the past 3 years. Digitalization remains a key growth driver across the group. In Private Nordic, digital sales increased by 15% over the year, and we achieved our operational ambition 1 year faster than originally planned. Another area of strong growth is Personal Insurance. During the year, Personal Insurance delivered 11% growth in gross written premiums by the addition of 30,000 insured persons. We're seeing a similar development in our SME business, where digital sales in Nordic Commercial grew by 15%. In total, we added over 3,000 new customers during the year with strong momentum in the fourth quarter.

Geographically, growth was solid across all our Nordic markets. Norway stood out with double-digit growth, both in private and commercial, supported by an increase in customers and insured objects. In the U.K., growth was strong for the full year, but slowed in Q4, reflecting seasonality effects and price discipline. Alongside growth, underwriting focus and cost efficiency remains central to how we operate. During the year, we continued to deliver on the synergies from the Topdanmark integration, keeping us firmly on track to achieve our planned cost improvements. At the same time, we maintained discipline in markets where competition is intensifying, and this will remain a priority.

Looking ahead, Sampo is well positioned to deliver on its financial targets in 2026. We have set an underwriting result outlook of EUR 1,485 million to EUR 1,600 million with the lower end reflecting a cautious view following tougher winter conditions at the start of this year. Finally, turning to capital returns. The Board has proposed a dividend of EUR 0.36 per share, a 6% increase from last year.

As highlighted in our updated distribution policy, Sampo remains committed to delivering progressive dividend per share development while leaving slightly more room for buybacks from 2026 onwards. I believe this ensured that we will be able to provide investors an attractive combination of progressive dividend income and share buybacks in the longer term.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with Sampo's performance in 2025 and confident in our ability to continue executing our strategy and creating long-term value.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Sampo Group Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. My name is Sami Taipalus, and I'm Head of Investor Relations at Sampo.

I'm joined on the call by Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud; and Group CFO, Knut-Arne Alsaker. The call will feature a short presentation from Morten followed by Q&A. A recording of the call will later be available on sampo.com.

With that, I hand over to Morten. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Sami, and good morning, and warmly welcome to the conference call on Sampo's third quarter results also on my side. As this is my first set of results as CEO, I'm going to spend a little bit of time on our strategy and how it's playing out in our results. But before I go into that, let me first comment briefly on the third quarter as such.

Sampo delivered another excellent set of results in the third quarter. By and large, we saw the same positive operating trends as earlier in the year, with strong premium growth, driven by private and SME and solid margins. The claims environment has been favorable with benign weather, large claims below budget and frequency trends in line with expectations. Still, we are continuing to be prudent in setting our loss ratio picks, meaning the benign claims environment has not fully flowed to the bottom line.

On our underwriting margin, we saw a roughly 50 basis points of improvement in the underlying Nordic combined ratio, driven by both the cost and risk ratio. U.K. margins, on the other hand, continued to normalize from the elevated levels seen in the prior year, but remained within our target range. All in, year-to-date underwriting profit grew by 17%, driving a 14% increase in operating EPS to EUR 0.38.

The result comes on the back of very strong performance through the strategic period so far, leading us to upgrade our operating EPS target from the period 2024 to 2026 to now above 9%. Outside of the operating result, we had a EUR 355 million gain from our stake in NOBA, driven by successful IPO, followed by strong share price performance. We sold only 1/4 of our holdings in the IPO, meaning we retain a 15% stake in NOBA valued at EUR 636 million, at the end of September. The EUR 150 million sales proceeds from the IPO will be returned to shareholders through a share buyback announced today.

So that was an overview of the result. Now, let me turn to strategy. I'd like to start with a short comment on where Sampo is as a company today. We are, of course, a pure-play P&C insurer, large and well diversified with EUR 10 billion of premiums, spread across 5 markets of roughly equal portfolio size and then the 3 Baltic countries on top of this. However, what really stands out is that Sampo is at the forefront of the industry in pretty much every area in which it operates.

As mainly a direct insurer, without material physical distribution, it has been essential for us to master the art of digital P&C insurance. In the Nordics, we've been at the helm of the industry digitalization, while the acquisition of Hastings in 2020 has catapulted us into a leading position in the U.K. price comparison website market.

At the same time, our unparalleled partnership network with the Nordic motor industry, bring wide customer reach and expertise in new car technology. We are a leading -- we are a leader and digital frontrunner also in the Nordic commercial market, and we are the market leader and preferred partner in the Nordic large corporate market.

Further, our pan-Nordic PI proposition has recently been strengthened by specialist insurer, Oona. Our Baltic business is a profitable, low-cost direct writer in a market of brokers and agents. Indeed, even Denmark, which used to be our Achilles heel, has been transformed into an attractive opportunity for us now through the acquisition of Topdanmark last year. In conclusion, we are in an enviable position to meet the future of our industry.

So where do we go from here? I see the biggest opportunity in leveraging our unique set of operational capabilities to drive organic growth. As shown on this slide, we see structural growth opportunities in areas representing more than half of group's premiums. These should be familiar, is the digital U.K. market, PI in the Nordics, private property, SMEs.

Our ambition in these areas are backed by structural trends as well as competitive advantages. For example, in PI, we are seeing increasing demand, combined with our first rate Nordic PI offering, which create opportunities across the customer segments. Similarly, U.K. consumers continue to shop more and more on price comparison websites, for which we have optimized our business.

Taking a step back, we see growth opportunities in other parts of our portfolio as well. Right now, I would highlight Nordic motor, where we are in a pole position to benefit from a normalization in new car sales. Now, I talked a lot about growth, so before we go further, let me be completely clear on one thing, we are only interested in growing, of course, at attractive margins. The underwriting discipline that Sampo is known for remains fully intact.

Turning to the numbers. Our results show that our strategy has traction. The growth that we've seen in the third quarter is a continuation of several years of strong development, as we can see on the left-hand side on this slide. Partially, this is the result of elevated inflation, particularly in the U.K., but at the same time, our growth is broadly based as we illustrate on the right-hand side. I would even argue that this understates the breadth of our growth momentum. In the third quarter, we achieved growth of 5% or more in all countries in both business area Private and Commercial in the Nordics.

Let's take a closer look at operating trends by segment. I'll start with Private Nordic, which delivered a fourth consecutive quarter of record high GDP growth. What's behind this? Well, let's focus at least on 3 things. First, good underwriting through the inflation spike means that we have had -- we have not had to do corrective price actions in the same way as some of our competitors. This supports retention and increasingly allows us to attract new customers.

Second, we have strong momentum in our target growth areas. PI, in particular, is strong, which is why we also have raised our guidance and outlook on GDP growth with a now ambition of more than 10% for the strategic period. Third, we are benefiting from higher new car sales with strong motor GDP growth of 13% in the quarter. Put simply, the investments we have made into underwriting, pricing and service are paying off as customer traction.

Let me turn to the U.K. The last few quarters have truly illustrated the skills we have in trading on price comparison websites. By actively shifting the mix and leveraging our innovative telematics product, we have sustained attractive policy count growth and solid margins, while market pricing has fallen. This comes on the back of a strong 2024, allowing us to raise our U.K. underwriting profit growth target to now 20% to 25%.

Looking ahead, we're always adapting to growth. We are always adapting growth to market conditions. The start of 2025 saw attractive motor market conditions, but as pricing declined, we have responded by slowing our growth rates. At the end of Q3, market pricing has fallen to a level, where we see fewer opportunities for growth, while larger part of the portfolio begins to hit up against target margins. As we are committed to being a disciplined underwriter, this means that we need to see increasing motor market pricing to be able to continue to grow.

Like in the Nordics, we have a great track record in delivering solid margins through the cycle, also in the U.K., and we very much intend to keep this. The good news is that due to diversification, we are not too reliant on any one market or strategy for profit growth.

Next, I will make a few short comments on Commercial. Our portfolio is dominated by SMEs that tend to act in a similar way to private customers. Here, we can leverage the same skill set that we have in private, particularly as the market is becoming more digital. Outside of SME, a material part of the book is what one could call local specialty business that require specific skills and a strong market presence. This includes our market-leading agriculture business in Denmark and Personal Insurance. Only some 20% of commercial sales are done via brokers, and retention are almost as high as in private.

Turning to performance. We continue to deliver solid growth, driven by our target areas, SME, PI and online sales. So we can again see that our strategy has traction.

Then, to the Topdanmark integration, Q3 saw a critical step in the Topdanmark integration process in the form of the legal merger of Topdanmark into If. Following this, we have seen a surge in synergies, as we've been able to move to If's Nordic operating model and start also to restructure our reinsurance programs.

We have now delivered run rate synergies of EUR 24 million year-to-date, meaning we have reached our target for 2025 one quarter early. You should take this with a pinch of salt, synergy emergence can be a bit lumpy. So we stick to our target of EUR 140 million of ultimate synergies in 2028. Nonetheless, the strong execution to date increases our confidence in being able to achieve this figure.

Longer term, the most important thing about the Topdanmark deal is that it transforms our competitive position in Denmark. Since it's still early days, we are not yet fully benefiting from our combined strength in the Danish market, and thus, there is a clear opportunity to improve the performance going forward.

Final slide, let me try to tie it all together. We are in a great position as a group. Our results show that we have an organic growth strategy that is working and that we continue to deliver attractive and stable margins. The third quarter performance brings year-to-date underwriting profit growth to 17%, driving a 14% increase in 9-month operating EPS. This follows a 13% operating EPS growth in 2024. On back of these strong results, we have increased our operating EPS target for 2024 to 2026 to above 9%, up from the previous target of about 7%. The increase in the target show that we are going into 2026 with confidence and with ambition. We have great momentum, and we will not let up on pace.

That concludes my opening remarks. Back to you, Sami, for Q&A.

Thank you, Morten. Operator, we are now ready to begin the question-and-answer session.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from David Barma from Bank of America.

Firstly, on growth in Nordic Private, it was really good again this quarter. Could you give us a bit more color on growth by country? We spent a lot of time on Norway in the last few quarters, but maybe if you could give us some color on the rest of the geographies and the key lines that have been driving the growth in Q3, please?

And then secondly, on Storm Amy in October, would you have some early estimates that you can share on the impact for Sampo, please?

And then lastly, on the U.K., top line and policy count growth were still pretty strong in the quarter despite average premium being down high single digits. So could you please comment on the profitability of that new business? And how you're seeing market conditions change since the comments you've made on -- regarding Q3, I mean, in the last 6 weeks or so?

Yes. Perfect. I'll try to answer to these 3 questions. First, on growth in Nordic Private, yes, quite a stellar performance, 10% growth overall for Private Nordic, and it's actually quite broad-based. So we have 5% or more in all countries, which actually is the situation, both within Private and Commercial. So both Private and Commercial produced more than 5% growth in all countries. And Norway, of course, still continue to stand out with double-digit growth. But it's good to see that the growth now is broad-based, and also, definitely, the other countries strongly support the growth story.

When it comes to Storm Amy, it was a fairly sizable event, mainly impacting Norway in beginning of October. Initial estimate for us is between EUR 30 million and EUR 40 million. So somewhat sizable event, but of course, we're used to seeing these events from time to time, typically in the fall.

Top line and policy growth in the U.K., what you will see is that we shifted the growth towards a little bit some other areas. So we had -- continued to have good growth in our telematics offering, also in other areas like bike, van, home. And then we had less growth in, what you could call, the core or classic motor product. So I think we used our excellent capabilities in the U.K. market in driving growth in areas where we believe that we still get attractive margins. And we still then have the same target for our U.K. operation. We talked about 88% to 90% in operating ratio. That is still what we focus on, and that's still what we aim to achieve when we write business, also the new business that we write now.

The next question comes from Ulrik Zürcher of Nordea.

Yes. I thought the Nordic cost ratio was quite impressive in this quarter. Has anything changed? I think you indicated around 22.5% or something for the full year, which would mean, the cost ratio is a bit back-end loaded into Q4. Has that changed? And also, I'm wondering about given the strong top line momentum and scale economics that you have with -- like what should we look out for, for cost improvement in '26?

Yes. The Nordic cost ratio develops favorably. As you remember, the starting point is 23%, when we include the overhead cost in Topdanmark, that is now included in If's cost base. And the progress is good. So we have a target of 40 basis points reductions for this year, and that's also the target for next year. Of course, growth is supporting this, and also, the synergy realization is supporting this. But again, there is nothing new on the target. We have a 40 basis points target for this year and also next year on cost ratio reduction in the Nordics.

Okay. Great. And also just a follow-up slightly on Norway. Like, obviously, this sort of exceptional situation can't continue forever. Do you see it continuing into next year? Or are we approaching sort of the peak of the market repricing?

That's hard to comment on really what will happen in the future. Pricing in the Norwegian market has come down a little bit over the last few months. And, of course, it's difficult to expect that repricing will continue on these levels, but I'll revert from speculating when it comes to exactly when.

And also, a last one, just on the renewal date. I think it was mentioned in your presentation, but -- should we expect like continued strong commercial momentum into the renewal date with both price hikes and new volumes or just more normalized 5%?

I think we continue to expect good development on the commercial book of business, also in the coming quarters.

The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca.

Hope you can hear me clearly. The 2 questions I would choose today. First is the solvency even when adjusted for a little bit the buyback. I mean, was -- is there anything you would flag in that operating earnings contribution of about 9%, a touch lighter than other quarters. And maybe there's nothing to flag really, but I just thought I'll ask you on the solvency.

The other thing I would -- wanted to quickly check is -- when we see your Slide 56, which is very helpful on the new car sales, and I see some big moves, but also Sweden being a little lower than recent, at least last 2 quarters, is there something to flag? Because also Q3 '24 was quite weak on the Swedish number here on the Slide 56. Is there something you would like to flag here? Also because -- are you seeing more competition? We've heard one of your peers talk about opening new contracts with car dealers. There's something you'd like to -- is there something there that is worth noting here for you?

Vinit, why don't I start with the solvency, Knut-Arne here, while Morten is trying to find Slide 46 (sic) [ Slide 56 ]. There's really nothing to flag on the solvency in terms of things that worry me. There are some things to be aware of in the 172% that we print. As you referred to, it is including the full buyback, which we announced today, which shaved off 5% on the solvency.

Then there are some seasonality in calculating solvency ratios, where that ratio will go up in the beginning of the year because we have a tilt on renewals towards 1/1. So there's a lot of premium reserves, which is beneficial for the solvency calculation, and there's less premium reserves in the third quarter. In the third quarter, that basically shaved off a couple of percentage points of the solvency. But like I said, that will come back.

Then, the solvency ratio in the third -- on 30th of September was lower due to higher FX risk related to NOBA. We didn't -- we basically couldn't hedge the Swedish krona exposure before we knew what the share price roughly would land on when it comes to NOBA post-IPO, but that is now being done, and a lot of it has already been done. So that will add back some 3, 4 percentage points on the solvency as well.

And then fourthly, I think it is, there is a bit of technicalities related to the legal merger of Topdanmark, it's only 1% or so. That also will come back in the beginning of the year when we have the internal model in place. That is on top of the already announced SCR benefit of EUR 60 million to EUR 90 million, which we talked before. So there are some things that move the solvency ratio a little bit like I now had listed, but nothing that worries me in terms of the stability and solidity of our capital base.

Good. And then to the now famous Slide 56. So that's the overview of new car sales in the Nordics. And as it shows, strong development in the Nordics overall, new car sales increasing with almost 10%, which is, of course, something that supports us, in particular, business area Private, where we see a 13% GDP growth on motor actually in the third quarter.

Then the growth is mainly driven by other countries than Sweden. And for us, it's, in particular, important with growth in the Swedish market due to this special car damage warranty construction, where we are clearly the market leader, continue to be the market leader, which means that we have a good upside when the Swedish market continue to bounce back. But it's good to see now at least that the Swedish new car sales is also starting to show positive development.

The next question comes from Nadia Claressa from JPMorgan.

Two questions from me, please. The first one is just going back on reserving. I think based on your opening commentary, Morten, it does seem like Q3 was a case of being opportunistically more cautious. So if you could just please confirm that the Q3 PYD is driven purely by this rather than any developments or underlying issues in your book? That would be great.

And also, is this something that we should continue to expect going forward if the large loss experience allows for it? Or was this also more extra caution given your first quarter as CEO? So that's the first question.

And secondly, on the change in the operating EPS target, just out of curiosity, why are you upgrading this now? I mean, were there any specific drivers that changed your view in the past quarter alone? Or was this more of like a catch-up given the strong year-to-date performance?

Good. I think on the reserving, you're exactly right that this is how we typically operate. We try to be cautious. We would like to have sufficient reserves, and of course, we saw a very benign development in the third quarter with benign development on large claims, benign development in terms of weather claims and also favorable frequency development. So it's part of our DNA to make sure that we have strong reserves, and there is nothing more than that, that explains the reason why we have a little bit less runoff gain in this quarter.

Then, to the change in the operating EPS target, while we thought it was natural to do an update in a way almost midterm in the strategy period. Could I have done it after Q2, but then it would have been the previous CEO making predictions for the future. So we thought it was sensible for us to do it now. And it's a good way for me to, of course, also indicate that we have a strong belief in continued strong development, continued strong performance. So that's why we chose to update the operating EPS target at this time.

The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

Just one quick question as most of the other ones have been asked. Just on the new car sales, could you help us understand what are your market shares in each country with new car sales? Why I'm asking this is because your comments sort of makes me believe that you're going to benefit from rising sales in each country. But in the past, you have mentioned that Sweden is an exception where you, I think, have around 40% market share. So just trying to get a sense of where the other countries are, and that will be quite helpful.

Yes, it's correct that we will benefit from increased new car sales in, of course, all markets. We are somewhat stronger on new car transactions than used car transactions. So a growth in this will benefit us in all markets. Don't have sort of exact market shares on the top of my head. But, in Sweden, we have about 70% -- 7-0, 70% market share on the car damage warranty construction. We have partnership with, by far, the most of the large brands in Sweden. And that's why that market is of particular importance. And again, when you buy a car in Sweden, you get a car damage warranty that comes with the car for free, is paid by the importer, and we are the main provider of this type of insurance.

So sorry, just to follow up on that. For the other countries, could you at least give us a flavor of how far you are from the 70% mark? I mean, would you say you're roughly close to that? Or materially...

No, no, that's far from. This is quite an exceptional thing. The car damage warranty construction is something that only exists in Sweden. In the other markets, we would be typically having a market share a little bit above our underlying market share in motor in each market. So we will have an overweight towards new cars, but absolutely not in the same magnitude.

The next question comes from Emil Immonen from DNB Carnegie.

Just a couple more. First, on the operating EPS growth target, the 9%. Could you maybe elaborate on exactly how you think about it? The underlying driving factors as to reach it on average, you don't need that much growth next year, it would seem to me at this point.

Yes. And I think, in many ways, you have to look at the target with the same lens that you typically do when looking at Sampo's targets, it's an above 9% target. It's not 9%, it's above 9%. And I think it's signaling that we expect that we'll continue a strong performance, but it's an above 9% target.

Okay. And then one more question on NOBA, about how you approach that now as an investment. It was IPO-ed, and it's performing quite well on the stock market, it would seem. Is it still a legacy investment in your view that you want to exit fully? Or what's the thinking on that?

Yes, we've been rather clear on that all the time that our strategy is to exit fully. So we sold down from 20% to 15% in conjunction with the IPO. And we will, of course, in the future, also reduce our holding and eventually exit the NOBA position.

The next question comes from Henry Heathfield from Morningstar.

I was just wondering if I could return back to this sort of cost ratio, basically in the Nordics. So if I'm right, you're tracking or you're currently at 22.5%. Based on the 40 bps, you should be at 22.6% if I am right, and you're at EUR 24 million year-to-date, which is the target. So I'm just kind of wondering what's stopping you, either this year or next year, from kind of raising those cost synergy targets?

I think we believe that we have an ambitious target in reducing by 40 basis points for a number of years going forward. That will give us strong support in terms of also underlying profitability. Of course, cost ratio is always jumping a bit up and down quarter-to-quarter. But yes, we are on good track on delivering on the 40 basis points improvement for this year and also have a good outlook then for next year. But I think 40 basis points is substantial and an important contribution, of course, to the Nordic business. So we continue with that as the target.

Is there anything I should be thinking about in terms of the fourth quarter in terms of headwinds or you're just being conservative basically and sticking to your targets really?

No. I think, on the fourth quarter, we, of course, have the information about the Storm Amy, which is why we chose not to increase the forecast, but rather stick to the previous announced forecast or outlook. That, of course, is a sizable event, but something that is quite natural for our business, something that we typically see at this time of the year. But that's what's kind of puts a little bit of caution on the fourth quarter.

The next question comes from Youdish Chicooree from Autonomous Research.

This is Youdish from Autonomous Research. So my 2 questions. The first one is on the growth topic in the Nordics. You talked about the solid and broad-based trends in Private and Commercial. But could you also comment on Industrial? And yes, I'm really -- I really want to know whether you think this segment could be a drag on the overall growth next year. That's my first question.

And then secondly, on the fixed income running yield, I mean, for the first time, the mark-to-market yield dropped below the running yield. So I was wondering if you could help us understand the implications of this and whether the book yield or the book running yield will drop by roughly 30 basis points in the coming couple of years, basically?

Yes. I'll address the growth in Industrial, and then, Knut-Arne will do the fixed income and running yield. .

Industrial is showing a minus 50% growth in gross written premiums in the third quarter. One should bear in mind that it's a small quarter for industrial. There's not that many customers renewing in the third quarter. So in terms of nominal amounts, this is not a huge figure. Year-to-date growth is down by some 4% in industrial.

Largely, this is driven by the derisking that we've done in Industrial, where we'd like to see less volatility from our industrial business, and in particular, the property part of it, which should secure our profits going forward.

In terms of growth, Industrial is, of course, a little bit different than the other business areas. We will only grow in Industrial when we see that the market opportunity allows for it. And the Industrial, which, of course, is the same also for other business areas, but you have more volatility on the pricing in the Industrial segment. So, therefore, it's natural that the growth in industrial is a little bit more volatile than what you see in Private and Commercial, but it's usually more a stable development.

On the fixed income running yield, Youdish, I would say that you're right in your assumption, everything else equal, and then, let's see where rates go in the future. But everything else equal, the running yield would trend downwards to the mark-to-market yield that we indicated end of third quarter. So roughly a 30 basis point drop, but trending downward, not necessarily in 1 quarter, obviously, given the maturity profile that we have.

The next question comes from Vash Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.

Just a quick follow-up on your comment on NOBA. So we know you have, I think, 180-day restriction. But just trying to understand, is it fair to assume that you would sell down the entire stake within the current plan, so which is by the end of 2026? Or do you think there's a risk some of it might fall over to 2027 as well?

No, it's correct that we have a 180-day lockup, and we started with ownership of close to 20%. Now, we reduced it down to 15%. It's not likely that we will sell off everything, of course, at once after the lockup period expires. We have to look at the market development, and most likely, this is going to be a more gradual process. But it all depends on market conditions at the time. So it could take some time, but -- and I think that's the natural sort of expectation that we do this gradually in a controlled manner.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

All right. Thank you very much. That concludes the call for today. Thank you for listening in.

Good morning. I'm Morten Thorsrud, CEO of Sampo Group. It's a pleasure to share my first quarterly update as CEO, including strong growth, successful execution of our strategy and updated EPS target and a new buyback program. Sampo is a unique P&C insurance group, combining leading positions in attractive markets with cutting-edge digital capabilities that enable excellent service at high efficiency. The strong third quarter results validate our strategic focus on leveraging our operational capabilities to drive organic growth at attractive margins.

We achieved 16% growth in the operational EPS this quarter on the back of strong organic growth and the delivery of Topdanmark synergies. Our sustained delivery of strong results give us the confidence to raise our operational EPS target for this strategic cycle running from 2024 to 2026 to above 9%. Private Nordic saw a record gross written premium growth of 10%, showing that our investments in our customer propositions are paying off. Market conditions across both our Private Nordic and Nordic Commercial segments remain strong with above 5% growth in all geographies in both customer segments.

It's also comforting to notice that new car sales in the Nordics continue to rebound after a period of lower activity. As a testament to our underwriting discipline and focus on disciplined growth, we actively managed the declining market pricing in the U.K. Likewise, in the Industrial segment, we carefully managed our exposure to large property risks, leading to a decline in gross written premiums during this quarter. The Topdanmark integration is proceeding very well, and we are already at the full year synergy target for 2025.

We have now realized EUR 24 million worth of run rate synergies by the end of September. Turning to capital management. We are launching a new EUR 150 million buyback program today, funded by the proceeds of the recent NOBA IPO. Moving forward, we will continue the disciplined approach to capital management that we have pursued over recent years. All in all, I'm very satisfied with Sampo's continued strong performance, and I see this quarterly result as a confirmation that we are on the right path strategically.