Earnings Labs

American Financial Group, Inc. (AFG)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, May 7, 2014

$130.98

+1.10%

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Transcript

Carl Lindner

Management

Good morning. We appreciate the opportunity to talk about AFG, a subject we enjoy talking about. Here is what Craig and I are going to talk about today. Key question is to why invest in AFG? Few things that we’re going to be talking about are core values, corporate culture, diversified specialty niches, the momentum in the premium growth side and the property and casualty side, the strong annuity performance, superior underwriting talent and culture, superior investing talent, what we’ve been doing intelligently to use excess capital. And talk about some good things, the growth in the book value and our compounded shareholder return. Let me just a little bit about our corporate values. We have 30 separate specialized entrepreneurial insurance units, which have full responsibility and full accountability for their businesses. We think it’s a good model. They are fun jobs. I like to tell our employees that we have 30 CEOs, and we have very little turnover in those positions. I think we probably lost one of those presidents in probably last 10 years. And we have a culture that people enjoy working with it and to write incentives. And we have a very cohesive deep management team. The environment and culture itself starting with integrity, which is where things need to start. That’s clearly at the top of our values in our corporate culture. We do have a strong work ethic, but interestingly enough, we’ve been a company that’s been at balance with the family and work for about 25 plus years. And again adds to an environment where the average employee that works for us, not just our management team who likes our culture, who likes what we’re doing and we’re an exciting place to work. We’ve got great spread in diversity of our business. None…

Craig Lindner

Management

Thank you, Carl. American Financial Group acquired our annuity business in 1974 as part of a larger acquisition. At that time, the annuity business had assets of $30 million, and since then the assets have grown at an 18% compound annual rate. Company is focused on fixed and fixed-indexed annuities. 2013 was another record year of operating earnings. In 2013, we had 28% growth in pre-tax core annuity operating earnings. The average assets and reserves grew by about 15%. And a significant increase in interest rates had a favorable impact on the accounting for indexed annuities. I’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. We price to achieve 12% return on capital. In the last couple of years, we’re able to do a little bit better than that on new sales. In 2013, we had premiums of a little over $4 billion, an increase of 33% over the previous year. The next slide shows the growth over a long period of time of the business. When we acquired our annuity business, we had $30 million of assets, and we ended last year with a little over $24 billion of assets, a pretty – as you can see very steady growth over a long period of time. This is a five-year picture of premiums and earnings. Frankly the challenges and ratings downgrades that some of our competitors experienced in the ’08, ’09 period created a lot of opportunities for us, especially in the bank market. You can see that over the five-year period of time, our earnings have little bit more than tripled. As I mentioned, our focus is on fixed and fixed-indexed annuities, actually a very good fit. They are spread businesses and fit very well with the investment skills that we have. We are focusing on…

Unidentified Analyst

Management

[Inaudible - Microphone Inaccessible] the logic behind the acquisition of National Interstate and also the price that you are paying for it. I think you might be overpaying?

Carl Lindner

Management

Sure. Can you hear me? The logic behind the offer for National Interstate is pretty straight forward and it’s laid out in offer to purchase that we published on February 5. Since we’re in offer period, I prudently will check myself to comment that are in that offer to purchase. And it’s fairly complete. National Interstate is a business that we’ve considered before. It’s a specialty property and casualty business operating in a niche, like where there are other specialty property and casualty niche operations. The earnings of the company have been under pressure as a result at this market, and it’s our feeling that National Interstate might fully complete its corrective action plans more appropriately as a private company wholly-owned by AFJ. And that outcome will be determined by the shareholders potentially tangible or not [ph]. In terms of the price of $28 and the offer to purchase Interstate that we consider to be appropriate, we looked a premiums paid and now that’s going private type transaction and in 2013 [indiscernible] offer. We think it’s a fair opportunity for shareholders to know National Interstate and convert their ownership in cash that attracts a premium, have the certainty of that value in invested capital [Technical Difficulty].

Unidentified Analyst

Management

In addition to the National Interstate acquisition, how about the Summit acquisition. Can you comment on that a bit considering others particularly Liberty Mutual strategically reducing its workers’ comp exposure? Why you see it as a strong strategic fit?

Carl Lindner

Management

I think number one, Liberty Mutual. They have a Liberty brand which was – which competes against Summit. I think that they are focused on a multi-line approach including comp. And I think Summit might have been kind of non-core to their brand building and their approach to things over time. So it makes sense for them. For us, we’re in the specialty workers’ comp business through a public indemnity in California, and have done well over a long period of time. And we have a large deductible niche business in comp, what we call strategic comp. Both of our workers’ comp businesses are in good order. We feel that this year, Republic is moving towards action here underwriting profitability. Our strategic comp large deductible business is profitable and both those businesses have good returns. We have our house in order. And Summit was an opportunity to acquire another specialty workers’ comp rider that has great market position. They are the number one in the southeastern United States. So it fits very well geographically with what we’re doing. And has a good management team. And we’re very excited to be making that investment. Jay Cohen – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: We have time for another question. I’ll grab the mike and ask it. The crop business, specifically the farm bill, it seems part of the change occurring is to make crop insurance a more important part of the help they give to farmers, you play an important role there obviously, this has to be good for your business. Can you talk about the impact that it could have?

Carl Lindner

Management

Yes, I think we agree with your assessment, Jay. We think the farm bill is a net positive. It makes the government multi-peril program more important as really the cuts were done in food stamps and direct aid to farmers in that. I think it really reinforced the importance of the program. So we had good market position. We're the fourth largest rider in that business. So we are very pleased that the farm bill has passed, and think it will be positive. Jay Cohen – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: So we can't quantify yet at this point what it could mean for you?

Carl Lindner

Management

That’s probably right. I think one interesting little twist I think is that Congress, I think will have the authority to set the economics rather than the RMA or the government agency is our understanding. So it’s really two, three, four year negotiations and that type of thing that happen ever so many years that probably more congress that will set the economics versus the RMA. I think it had some poor flexibility in changing things on an ongoing basis. So I think that could be a positive, but creates more certainty. Jay Cohen – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: That’s great. That’s all the time we have. Before we let you go, so just to make sure you guys know that there are box lunches available. The next presentation starts at 12:35. It’s kind of a working lunch. So grab some lunch, you can bring it back in here and join me in thanking the team from AFJ.