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00:00Let's start with what was the great first half? What drove this and what are you expecting going forward in terms of the rate of growth? Good morning, everybody. Sherri. Great to see you. It was a very pleased with the first half performance of the business. We saw an excellent set of financial results and operating results in both growth of the business, the earnings growth and in the growth in the value of the cash generation that we have. The value of new business, which is our key growth measure, grew by 14%, while our operating profit after tax grew by 12% per share. And our underlying free surplus generation, which is our key operating cash measure that grew by 10%. I think importantly, the growth was broad based. Broad based. We saw growth in 13 of our markets across the business with Hong Kong, our largest market growing by 24% to $1.1 billion. We saw growth in ASEAN that was up 20% with particularly strong growth in Singapore and in Thailand. We saw growth in India that was up 38% and China grew by 10% on an underlying basis. Also, in the first half, we returned $3.7 billion to shareholders. And I think our confidence, the outlook for the future is reflected in the 10% increase in the dividend. So overall, we're very, very pleased with the performance, a strong performance for the half year. You talk about the Hong Kong performance, some of it also driven by mainland customers. How strong do you see the demand from there going forward? Could you put maybe some numbers to it? Yeah, we saw very strong growth in the mainland Chinese visitor segment. That was up by 30%. It's around half of our business. But we also saw strong growth in the domestic segment that grew by 18%. That's the other half. The business has been growing strongly over the last few years post COVID. We saw strong growth momentum building from last year, and that's continued into the first half. As we look forward, we saw recruitment of new agents was very strong, with 15% growth in the recruitment, and that builds the momentum even further. So we're confident in the outlook for the Hong Kong business. We see strong demand, but we also see strong supply in terms of our agent productivity and growth. Garth, when it comes to mainland China, how are you dealing with the lower rate environment and of course, your expansion plans there? Have you seen any more approvals when it comes to regulation in different provinces where you operate? Yeah. In terms of the interest rates, we take a position where we match all assets and liabilities for the very long term. So the average remaining duration of our enforced portfolio of bonds, for example, is more than 30 years they've been invested in the past at very high rates. And so that's given us a very strong foundation. And for the new business that we layer on successive layers of business that provide future profits that we reprice on a regular basis, we reprice last year, we'll be repricing again from the 1st of September this year to reflect those lower interest rates. But importantly, a lot of the sources of the profit that we have in China come from our protection business. We're a big protection business seller and those profits are immune to the interest rate movements. In terms of the new provinces, we're very, very excited about that as a future growth engine for the whole business. If you look back, we have the five original businesses that are performing very well. A differentiated premier agency in China has higher productivity than the rest of the industry, and that drives future growth. We've seen 18% increase in the number of new recruits and in the new provinces we saw 36% growth in in the past year. And as we look forward, we feel those new provinces have substantial room for growth, and we're looking to grow those businesses by around 40% per year on average over the next five years. So substantial growth momentum there. You mentioned the other key markets as well, like Thailand, for example. We continue to watch central bankers getting together in Jackson Hole this week and this monetary easing environment that we're facing now, given the growth stalling around the world on tariff threats, how are you assessing the environment in all of these other nations that could potentially see lower rates as well? Yeah. I think the key thing with our business, Sherry, is that we have a strong agency force, and that strong agency force is able to meet the needs of our customers, which are primarily around protection and long term savings. People have low social provision in Asia. They need to save for their future. And we see that come through through interest rate cycles. We've seen the Thai business grow by 35% over the first half, with very strong demand for protection products in both health and critical illness. Similarly, we saw growth of 16% in Singapore, which is driven by the stewardship funds that we have, the investment funds where the policyholders leave the difficult investment decisions to us. They've grown very strongly. So we see those needs continuing through cycles and our agency force able to meet those needs and those demands for product. Goff, What product lines in Thailand do you think can be a bit more resilient, though? Well, we have two real focuses for the business. The first is the protection business that I've just talked about, the health, the critical illness to meet the protection needs of our customers. But we also sell the unit linked business, which is tied to the performance of markets over over a longer period of time. It provides our policyholders with the prospect of very good future returns, but it also contains a very low liability cost for the business. So those two types of business are very popular. We've seen strong growth, as I just mentioned, and we are very popular with our customers and they're resilient to interest rate movements. Tell us a little bit more about your customers. What sort of demographic are you targeting? Is it different by region? And of course, we know that high net worth clients are also a big focus. We tend to focus on the middle class and affluent segments. In China, we have a differentiated business that is more focused on the upper middle class and affluent segments. But we also have a very strong high net worth business, particularly in the global centers of Hong Kong and Singapore, where we see a lot of that business being booked. We've seen good growth in that business, particularly in Singapore. And as a result we've dedicated a sales force to that. We have dedicated service, dedicated products and so on. We've seen the wealth business continue to grow across Asia and we're very excited about the prospects for that segment. You touched on some of this interest rate environment backdrop earlier. I wonder, what about the exchange rate, what we're seeing in markets volatility? Do you see that as a potential risk? How manageable is all that? Well, we have a diversified business, so that clearly helps us. We're a local business. We sell our products in local currency, we invest in local currency. The Hong Kong business is, of course, a US dollar based business, and that's about 35% of the business. But the rest of the business is non-U.S. dollar currencies and Israel diversified. That helps us through currency movements and so on. But we're a long term business, we're a sustainable business, and we take a longer term view and we find that over time, those currency movements even out overall, you can see that in our numbers where we've benefited from a weaker U.S. dollar in our numbers. But, you know, we look through to constant exchange rates where we saw operating profit grow 12% and our value of new business growing by 14%, as I say.

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