Jeff Miller
Analyst · KBW. Your line is open
Thank you very much. This is Jeff Miller, Chief Financial Officer. Good morning, everyone and welcome to the Donegal Group conference call for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2017. This morning we issued a news release outlining our quarterly and full year results. For a copy of that release, please visit the Investor Relations section of our website at donegalgroup.com. I will begin today’s call with commentary on our financial results. Kevin Burke, President and Chief Executive Officer will then provide his comments on the quarter and discuss our current business developments and initiatives. After our prepared comments, we will open the line for any questions you may have. Before we get started, you should be aware that certain statements made in our news release and in this conference call are forward-looking in nature and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our news release for more information about forward-looking statement. Further information on risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements is available in the 2016 report on Form 10-K that we have submitted to the SEC. You can access our Form 10-K through the Investors section of our website under the SEC filings link. We plan to file our 2017 Form 10-K on or around March 9. We provided a reconciliation of non-GAAP information as required by SEC Regulation G in the news release we issued this morning. With that, let’s move to a discussion of our quarterly operating results. While our results reflected a number of challenges that we experienced throughout the fourth quarter of 2017, we did see a number of positive trends that we believe will improve our operating performance going forward. There were a lot of moving parts during the quarter and I will attempt to clarify the impact as we go along. Our fourth quarter was highlighted by strong organic growth across our regional markets as evidenced by higher premiums for the period in both our commercial and personal lines business segments. Net premiums earned of $181.1 million for the fourth quarter of 2017 increased 7.2% compared to the fourth quarter of 2016. Net premiums written of $171.4 million for the fourth quarter of 2017 increased 5.9% compared to the fourth quarter of 2016. We expect our 2018 growth to shift toward more profitable lines of business as a result of a number of measures that we are continuing to implement. Kevin will provide more details about those measures in a few minutes. Turning to the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was enacted in December 2017, we reported additional income tax expense for the fourth quarter of 2017 of $4.8 million or $0.17 per diluted Class A share. This impact represented the effect of applying the reduced 2018 corporate income tax rate to our net deferred tax assets. Beginning in 2018, we expect the tax law changes to be beneficial reducing our effective tax rate and income tax expense. Net income, excluding the tax impact was $2 million or $0.07 per diluted Class A share for the fourth quarter 2017 compared to $5.6 million or $0.21 per diluted Class A share for the fourth quarter of 2016. Our combined ratio was 104.8% for the fourth quarter 2017 compared to 100.5% for the prior year quarter. The increase related primarily to an increase in our loss ratio to 72% compared to 67.1% for the fourth quarter of 2016. I will provide some additional details with respect to our fourth quarter loss experience. Weather-related losses totaled approximately $5.4 million or 3 percentage points of our loss ratio decreasing from the $7.4 million of weather related losses or 4.3 percentage points of our loss ratio for the fourth quarter of 2016. Weather-related losses were generally in line with our 5-year average for the fourth quarter. Large fire losses, which we define as individual fire losses, exceeding $50,000 were $7.7 million or 4.3 percentage points of our loss ratio for the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to $7.4 million or 4.4 percentage points for the fourth quarter of 2016. In total, net development of reserves for losses incurred in prior accident years did not have a material impact on our loss ratios for the fourth quarters and full years of either 2017 or 2016. However, favorable development of workers’ compensation loss reserves largely offset unfavorable development, commercial multi-peril, personal auto and commercial auto loss reserves. So, the impact of weather, fires and reserve development was fairly consistent with our experience to the prior year quarter. The increase in our loss ratio was primarily related to higher frequency and severity and casualty losses. You may recall from prior calls that we had unusually low loss severity in our worker’s compensation line of business for the first 9 months of 2017. In the fourth quarter, worker’s compensation losses exceeding $50,000 spiked to $10.5 million far in excess of any quarter during the last 2 years. We attribute the increase to timing variations in the occurrence of large loss activity. Favorable prior year loss reserve development partially offset the severity increase netting to an 80.7% fourth quarter 2017 worker’s compensation combined ratio and for the full year, we achieved an excellent 79% combined ratio in that line. Similar to our experience in the fourth quarters of the past several years, we noted a significant impact from seasonality in the frequency and severity of personal auto and commercial auto losses. We primarily attribute this seasonality to increase driving activity around the holidays and the outset of winter weather conditions in several of our regions during the fourth quarter. Our loss ratios in both of these lines also reflected prior year reserve development and additional IBNR reserves to mitigate the adverse development trends we have experienced in recent years. During the full year 2017, we increased our bulk IBNR reserves by 15%. That compares to an increase of 11% during 2016. The 2017 reserve increases were heavily concentrated in commercial multi-peril, personal auto and commercial auto, which were the lines where we experienced adverse reserve development in 2017. We expect our actions to strengthen reserves in these lines during the year will improve our loss experience in 2018. Our expense ratio was 31.9% for the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to 32.4% for the fourth quarter of 2016 with the decrease attributable to lower underwriting base incentive costs. Turning briefly to the balance sheet and investment portfolio, Donegal Group continues to operate from a position of financial strength adhering to a relatively conservative investment strategy intended to limit the impact of market volatility on our investment income and portfolio value. Our fourth quarter 2017 net investment income was relatively consistent with the fourth quarter of 2016. Net realized investment gains were $1.5 million for the fourth quarter 2017 compared to $321,000 for the fourth quarter of 2016. Our total investments exceed $1 billion with 90% invested in high-quality fixed security investment. At December 31, 2017, our book value per share was $15.95 compared to $16.21 at December 31, 2016. The decrease was primarily attributable to the impact of the December 2017 tax law change, which reduced our book value per share by $0.17. We expect to recoup that impact quickly through reduced income tax expense beginning in 2018. At this point, I will turn the call over to Kevin for his comments on our quarterly results in business developments. Kevin?