Craig Kliethermes
Analyst · B. Riley FBR. Please go ahead
Thank you, Tom. Good morning, everyone. I want to provide some overall comments about the quarter and then get into some segments specific results and conclude by summing up the year. As Tom referenced, we reported 12% top-line growth and a 99 combined ratio for the quarter. Pretty good results for our Company, given the impact of Hurricane Michael. Despite the loss estimate coming in at the low end of the range we previously reported, Hurricane Michael was a very severe storm and the event resulted in the largest hurricane loss in RLI's history. It was also our largest single event loss since the Northridge earthquake and the first time we ceded loss to our catastrophe treaty since 2005. The fact that we were able to sustain Michael and still achieve an overall underwriting profit for the quarter and an underwriting profit in our Property segment for the year, given the other catastrophes that occurred, is further evidence of our well diversified specialty portfolio and resiliency. Growth for the quarter remained widespread across our portfolio with drivers being a healthy mix of newer products, underlying economic growth and increased marketing efforts in our more established products and rate increases in select spots. We have generally found that the market is coming to us, creating opportunities, where some pain points are starting to be felt by our competitors. We see this in terms of increased submission activity across most of our portfolio. Rates are still relatively flat, but upward is needed most. Despite the improved opportunities, we pride ourselves on our consistency of underwriting appetite and pricing, with the willingness to let accounts go where we have to, staying true to our strong disciplined underwriting culture. I'll now dive into a little more detail by segment. In Casualty, we were able to grow 16% for the quarter and reported 94 combined ratio. This growth was broad-based, with only a few product exceptions. We continue to see very good growth opportunities in our commercial and personal umbrella businesses through a combination of increased marketing efforts, modest rate increases and investments in technology and customer experience, which are starting to pay off. Our executive products portfolio continued to realize growth as they focus on diversification within their space. Transportation grew 13%, but almost all of that was rate driven. We feel very good about the progress we've made over the last two years in transportation. We ended the year with back to back double-digit rate increases in this sector and actual estimates have stabilized and even improved in more recent accident years. We have the team that can succeed in all markets and we will continue to push rate in 2019. We will look for exposure growth opportunistically as the commercial auto market remains in turmoil. We continue to get a healthy amount of growth from newer products that were added over the last several years, including energy casualty, binding authority, cyber liability and a new captive program we added in late 2018. Overall, reserve releases were pretty robust and broadly felt in the Casualty segment and are larger year-over-year both on the quarter and for the entire calendar year. We believe we have a pretty good handle on loss costs, but continue to monitor them vigilantly. For the year, we ended with top-line up 12% and 98 combined ratio for the Casualty segment. Moving on to Property. This segment suffered the impact of Hurricane Michael for the quarter, reporting a 130 combined ratio, while growing top-line 9%. As expected, the brunt of the Michael impact was felt in our non-admitted property business. For the quarter, we continue to see moderate rate increases in wind with relatively flat rates on earthquake. Given the catastrophe activity in 2017 and 2018, we would hope that the market will respond with some moderate firming or at least provide some floor on pricing going forward. The catastrophe market is still a place we are finding opportunities to write new business, as the market rates rise to our level. As a side note, RLI was very minimally affected by the California wildfires and the Anchorage earthquake that occurred late in the quarter. In other property products, marine continues to grow and add scale, while keeping its loss ratio in check. There is some market disruption in marine with several competitors announcing exits or pairing their business. We have achieved six consecutive years of positive rate increase in marine and the improved economy continues to drive exposure growth on existing accounts. Finally, our Hawaii homeowners business top-line continues to benefit from renewed marketing efforts and from recognition of the exceptional claims service our team provided, following the volcano losses. For the year, the Property segment reported 16% top-line growth and a 99 combined ratio. In Surety, we were able to grow top-line 1% for the quarter and reported an 84 combined ratio. We have had solid performance across all four of the major products in our portfolio. We provide ourselves in our deep knowledge and consistent risk appetite. Competition remains very difficult in this segment and discipline is critical for long-term success. We will continue to take advantage of the opportunities that arise, try to build more depth with relationships that recognize our value proposition, invest in technology and ease of doing business and prepare for the next market opportunity. We ended the year with 1% top-line growth and an exceptional 75 combined ratio. Before I conclude, I want to cover a few activities that took place late in the quarter. About half of our reinsurance spend is placed at year-end with our broadest Casualty and Property treaties renewing. We generally saw flat pricing with little change in our retentions. Two changes of note were that we did buy $90 million more catastrophe cover at 1.1 because of some past and expected growth in exposures. And we paid about 10% more for our Property per risk cover due to loss activity in recent years. After factoring an exposure growth, this will result in an additional $5 million to $6 million estimated spend on property reinsurance for the coming year. I also want to offer a bit of color on some portfolio repositioning we have done in our Casualty segment recently. As you know, our strong culture of discipline and ownership requires that we constantly assess our portfolio products. Complacency is the enemy of success. We invest and nurture those products that show promise, manage risk reward trade offs and address underperformers with haste. As a result, we recently announced an exit of our healthcare facility business and we are also in process of exiting an underperforming book of general liability business for real estate investment trust. In addition, we work closely with Prime insurance with whom we have a 23% ownership stake to diversify their panel of reinsurers. This will reduce our quota share relationship downward from 25% to 6% participation starting on January 1st of this year. In light of Prime's continued rapid growth, we believe this was in both parties' best interest. The impact of all these changes removes approximately $50 million of top-line casualty premium going forward, while improving the bottom-line margins. Although, these decisions were not easy, we believe all of these moves to be healthy for our organization and enhances our ability to continue to outperform. RLI ended 2018 with 11% top-line growth and a 95 combined ratio. Accomplished a lot of great things this year that I'd like to recognize. We achieved our 23rd consecutive year of underwriting profit, while sustaining our largest aggregate catastrophe losses in over two decades. We delivered broad-based growth across most of our portfolio and ended with the highest gross and net premium in our history. Both our professional services group and marine who have struggled in difficult markets achieved underwriting profitability. Our transportation business has stabilized and continues to realize growth through rate. We had favorable loss reserve development across most of our portfolio and an aggregate that exceeded prior year. Investments in marketing and technology are starting to pay off and we repositioned our portfolio for improved balance and profitability, which is the stewardship we expect in demand of ourselves as shareholders. We had solid performance across all segments and products in our portfolio, much like my beloved Kansas City Chiefs. We had a great year, not as good as we liked, but we're excited about the future. We have exceptional talent, particularly in skill positions and we're making the investments and changes needed to make sure we can continue to compete at the highest level going forward. The future is bright. I want to thank all of the RLI associate owners for their relentless focus on underwriting profitability, customer service and execution. We are different and different worked again in 2019. I will turn it back to Aaron.