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Text: We look forward to discussing our first quarter 2021 results with you today.
Joining me for Assurant's conference call are Alan Colberg, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Richard Dziadzio, our Chief Financial Officer.
Yesterday after the market closed, we issued a news release announcing our results for the first quarter 2021.
The release and corresponding financial supplement are available on assurant.com.
We'll start today's call with brief remarks from Alan and Richard before moving into a Q&A session.
During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are important in evaluating the Company's performance.
As we continue to shift to a more fee income capital-light business mix, we introduced adjusted EBITDA as part of our restated financial statements in April.
This is another important financial metrics for the Company, reflective of our go-forward Global Lifestyle and Global Housing business.
We're very pleased with our results for the first quarter.
We delivered double-digit earnings growth, driven by favorable non-catastrophe loss experience, including improved underwriting in Global Housing as well as continued profitable growth in our Global Automotive, Multifamily Housing and Connected Living businesses.
Once again results demonstrated the attractiveness of our market leading Specialty P&C and Lifestyle offerings distributed across multiple channels.
This is in addition to the compelling growth opportunities emerging across mobile, auto, and renters.
Together, these businesses represent what we refer to as the connected world.
In 2020, our Connected World offerings represented two-thirds of our net operating income excluding catastrophes and in combination with our Specialty P&C businesses will enable us to continue to expand our innovative offerings and deliver a superior and seamless customer experience.
Generating over $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA in 2020, our business portfolio is well positioned to sustain above market growth and strong cash flows over time.
And as we look ahead, we are continuously investing to bring innovation to market to build a more sustainable future for all of our stakeholders.
To that end, we recently published our 2021 Social Responsibility Report highlighting the many ways we are delivering on our commitment as a purpose-driven company.
We are continuing to advance our ESG efforts, specifically within our strategic focus areas of talent, products, and climate.
Further integrating ESG within our business operations will be critical as we look to create an even more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that promotes innovation enhances sustainability and minimizes our carbon footprint for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Recent notable examples include, we are increasing all US hourly wages to at least $15 per hour by July, which supports the financial well-being of our employees.
We've launched in assessment of our carbon footprint, including our investment portfolio and supply chain as a critical step to setting a future long-term carbon emissions reduction goal.
And we further integrated sustainability into our offerings such as rolling out electric vehicle products globally and extending the mobile device lifecycle through trading services.
With HYLA, we recently passed a significant milestone repurposing our 100 million device.
This has extended the life of devices, put billions of dollars back into consumers hands and prevented additional e-waste from ending up in our landfills supporting Global Sustainability.
We are pleased with our progress and are proud of the recognitions we have received, including our inclusion in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and America's Best Employers for Diversity by Forbes.
As well as being awarded the Best Place to Work in several of the key markets we operate.
Sustainability and innovation go hand-in-hand.
Recently, we surpassed $100 million invested through Assurant Ventures, our venture capital arm.
This quarter several high-quality investments in our portfolio announced back transactions, including Cazoo, a fully digital UK car sales company and smart rent, a smart home automation provider.
Given current attractive valuations, these investments have the potential to generate strong returns while also providing strategic insight that support our connected world businesses, creating value-added partnerships, and piloting new innovations.
Now, let me share some first quarter highlights for each of our operating segments.
We continue to see strong growth in Global Lifestyle, increasing earnings by 7% year-over-year.
Over the years, we continuously invested in mobile capabilities such as same day local repair or come-to-you to repair for mobile devices, which provide another opportunity to drive value for our clients and the end consumer.
Most recently in Connected Living, we further strengthened our product capabilities and customer experience through the acquisition of TRYGLE in Japan.
TRYGLE develops and operates a mobile phone app that allows consumers to manage the lifecycle of their devices and centrally organizes digital product manuals for all connected products.
Collectively, all of our investments have helped lead the 15 new client program launches in 2015.
This includes partnerships with several US cable providers including Xfinity and Spectrum as well as large mobile carriers in Japan like KDDI and Rakuten.
Recently, we've expanded our global partnership with Samsung through the launch of Samsung Care+, a smartphone protection program in Brazil and Mexico.
We expect to further extend this partnership globally.
We will continue to build on the strong momentum we have with our global multi-product and multi-channel strategy bolstered by the additional investments we are making.
As an example HYLA Mobile added scale and technology capabilities to our global trade-in and upgrade business and has been performing even better than our initial expectations.
We're now providing over 30 trading programs around the world.
The acquisition positions us to benefit from favorable tailwinds in the global mobile market, including the upcoming 5G smartphone upgrade cycle and new client relationships.
In Global Automotive, we continue to benefit from our scale and expertise as we now cover over 50 million vehicles.
Already this year, we've seen a significant increase in auto production versus pre-pandemic first quarter levels.
In the year since acquiring AFAS, we've combined our award winning training programs to create the Automotive Training Academy by Assurant.
These expanded in-person and virtual programs will allow us to scale faster and adapt to the changing needs of dealers and automotive professionals.
Within Global Financial Services, we've added a number of embedded card benefit clients recently, including the previously announced partnership with American Express.
We look forward to enhancing these partnerships and building on our existing suite of products.
Moving to Global Housing.
Net operating income excluding reportable catastrophes grew 17% as we benefited from favorable non-GAAP loss experience, including improved underwriting results.
Within our Lender-placed business, we continue to play a vital role in supporting the mortgage industry as we track over 31 million loans.
The business remains well positioned and we expect to benefit from investments in our superior customer platform over the long-term.
Multifamily housing increased policies by 9% year-over-year to almost $2.5 million as we continue to grow through our affinity partnerships and PMC channel, including seven of the top 10 largest PMCs in the US.
We've also continued to grow our sharing economy offerings, which include car sharing, on-demand delivery, and vacation rental.
Over the last two years through our partnership with market leaders and on-demand delivery, we tripled the number of deliveries we protect over 1 billion deliveries.
While it is too early to gauge whether the pandemic has fundamentally changed consumer demand for these services.
We're encouraged by our momentum and the potential for future products and services in the gig economy.
Now let's move to our first quarter results and our 2021 outlook.
Net operating income excluding cats grew by 13% to $182 million and earnings per share increased 16% to $3.03, demonstrating improved results in Global Housing and continued momentum in Global Lifestyle.
Given our strong performance in the first quarter and current business trends, we are increasing our full-year outlook for 2021.
We now expect 10% to 14% growth in operating earnings per share excluding catastrophes versus our initial expectation of 9% earnings per share growth.
EPS expansion from the $9.88 in 2020 will be driven by high single-digit earnings growth mainly from Global Lifestyle and the lower corporate loss.
Results will also benefit from share repurchases, including the completion of our three-year $1.35 billion objective in the initial return of net proceeds from the Global Preneed sale.
Our increased outlook largely reflects Global Housing's favorable non-catastrophe loss experienced in the first quarter.
As such Housing's earnings are expected to be down only modestly year-over-year from what was a strong 2020.
Looking at adjusted EBITDA, excluding catastrophes, the first quarter generated $302 million, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
We expect adjusted EBITDA will grow at a modestly higher rate than net operating income in 2021.
We ended March with $332 million of holding company liquidity, after returning $80 million to shareholders through common stock dividends and buybacks during the quarter.
And we expect to deliver on all of our commitments, sustaining our strong track record of capital return.
In addition, throughout the year, we will continue to make strategic investments in our portfolio to position us well for sustained long-term growth.
As Alan noted, we are pleased with our first quarter performance as our results across Global Lifestyle and Global Housing remains strong.
Before getting into our first quarter performance, I want to provide a quick update on the sale of our Preneed business.
In March, we announced our plan to sell the business for $1.3 billion to CUNA Mutual Group.
Since signing, we have completed the necessary regulatory filings and we remain on track to close the transaction by the end of the third quarter.
Now let's move to segment results for Global Lifestyle.
This segment reported net operating income of $129 million in the first quarter, an increase of 7% driven by Global Automotive and Connected Living.
In Global Automotive, earnings increased $7 million or 18%, results included a $4 million one-time benefit as well as a gain on investment income related to a specialty asset class from our TWG acquisition, which we don't expect to recur.
Year-over-year, underlying performance was driven by another quarter of global organic growth from US CPA and international OEMs as well as some favorable loss experience.
Connected Living grew earnings by 3%.
However, this was muted by a $7 million favorable client recoverable with an extended service contracts in the prior year period.
Underlying performance was driven by mobile subscriber growth in Asia Pacific and North America.
Higher trading results from increases in volume and contributions from our HYLA acquisition.
For the quarter Lifestyle's adjusted EBITDA increased 11% to $193 million, four points above net operating income growth.
This reflects this segment increased amortization related to higher deal related intangibles for more recent acquisitions in Global Automotive and Connected Living.
IT depreciation expense also increased, stemming from higher investment.
Lifestyle revenue decreased by $85 million.
This was driven mainly by a $98 million reduction in mobile trade-in revenue, primarily due to the contract change we disclosed last year.
Excluding this change, revenue for this segment was flat.
For the full year, we continue to expect Lifestyle revenues to be in line with last year at approximately $7.3 billion.
As expected overall trade-in volumes, which flow through fee income increased year-over-year and sequentially.
This was driven by four elements.
New phone introductions last year, greater device availability, carrier promotions and contributions from HYLA.
While the first quarter did benefit from strong mobile trade-in volumes, we do expect it to be a high watermark for the year, given historical seasonal patterns.
Since year-end, we've increased covered mobile devices by 600,000 subs driven by continued growth in North America and Asia-Pacific.
This year, we continue to expect covered mobile devices to grow mid single-digits compared to 2020, as we go subscribers in key geographies like the US and Japan.
As a reminder, we expect the growth rate of earnings to exceed the growth rate of covered mobile devices over time.
As we benefit from offering additional products and services to our clients and their end consumers.
For 2021, we still expect Global Lifestyle's net operating income to grow in the high single-digits compared to the $437 million reported in 2020.
Growth will come from all lines of business particularly Connected Living.
Adjusted EBITDA for this segment is expected to grow double-digits year-over-year.
Moving now to Global Housing.
Net operating income for the first quarter totaled $67 million compared to $74 million in the first quarter of 2020.
The decrease was largely due to $22 million of higher reportable catastrophes mainly related to the extreme winter weather particularly from areas like Texas.
Excluding catastrophe losses, earnings increased $50 million or 17%.
More than two-thirds of the increase was from favorable non-cat loss experience mainly in our specialty offerings, including sharing economy products.
We estimate that approximately half of the favorable loss experience in the first quarter was from underwriting improvements, with the remainder of the benefit, driven by favorable loss experience, which we don't expect to recur.
In addition, we saw continued growth in multifamily housing.
Lender-placed results were up modestly, higher premium rates, and favorable non-Cat loss experience were mostly offset by declining REO volumes from ongoing foreclosure moratoriums.
Looking at the placement rate, the modest sequential increase to 1.6% was attributable to a shift in business mix and is not an indication of a broader macro housing market shifts.
Revenue decreased 2% related to a reduction in our specialty product offerings, which included the impact from the exit of small commercial as well as lower REO volume.
This decrease was partially offset by growth in multifamily housing, which grew 8% year-over-year, driven mainly by our affinity partners.
We now expect Global Housing's net operating income excluding Cat to be down modestly compared to 2020.
This reflects our stronger first quarter and the assumption of a modest increase in our expected non-Cat loss ratio to more normalized levels for the remainder of the year.
We are also monitoring the REO foreclosure moratoriums in any additional extensions that may be announced.
As we position for the future, we will continue to invest in some of the business to sustain and enhance our competitive position.
At Corporate, the net operating loss was $22 million, which was flat year-over-year.
For the full year, we continue to expect the Corporate net operating loss to improve to approximately $90 million as we eliminate enterprise support costs associated with Global Preneed.
As we think about the remainder of the year for all of the Assurant, we are beginning to plan for a phase reentry of our workforce post-COVID and we are evaluating our real estate footprint to align with new business and employee need as we adapt to the future of work.
This may result in additional expenses throughout the year.
I also wanted to provide a quick comment on our investment portfolio.
With Preneed moving to discontinued operations, our investment portfolio is now approximately $7.9 billion, excluding cash and cash equivalent.
Given Preneed's relatively longer average duration of around 10 years compared to the rest of our business, following the sale of Preneed, our go-forward duration will drop to between 4.5 years to 5 years.
As a result our interest rate sensitivity will be reduced by approximately two-thirds.
Turning to holding company liquidity, we ended the first quarter with $332 million, which is $107 million above our current minimum target level.
In the first quarter, dividends from our operating segments totaled $183 million.
In addition to our quarterly corporate and interest expenses, we also had outflows from three main items.
$42 million of share repurchases, $43 million in common and preferred stock dividends, and $10 million mainly related to the acquisition of TRYGLE and Assurant Venture Investments.
Also in January, we redeemed the remaining $50 million of our March 2021 note.
And our mandatory convertible shares converted to approximately 2.7 million common shares during the quarter.
For the year overall, we continue to expect dividends to approximate segment earnings subject to the growth of the businesses and rating agency and regulatory capital considerations.
We've now completed over 70% of our $1.35 billion capital return objective from 2019 to 2021 and remain confident that we will meet this objective by the end of this year.
In addition, we expect to begin incremental buybacks prior to closing the Preneed transaction in the third quarter.
The total buybacks associated with the net proceeds from the sale are expected to be returned within one year of the transaction closed.
In the second quarter through April 30, we repurchased an additional 95,000 shares for $14 million.
In summary, our first quarter results demonstrate the strength of our business and our capital liquidity position.
We remain focused on completing the sale of Global Preneed and delivering on our 2021 financial objectives.

user
increases 2021 outlook to deliver double-digit earnings per share growth.
reportable catastrophes, per diluted share $3.03.
assurant - for fy 2021, expects net operating income, excluding reportable catastrophes, per diluted share, to increase about 10% to 14%.
qtrly total revenues $2,432.6 million versus $2,448.7 million.

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