Roy Gori: Yes. So Lemar, a couple of thoughts. I mean, again, I would just go back to my earlier point, and that is that we’re clearly in a very strong capital position. This has been a big focus for the company over the last 5 years. We’ve freed up $9 billion worth of capital, and that’s put us in a position of strength, which has given us a lot of flexibility and optionality, which is why we’ve deployed capital, not only organically but inorganically as well as against dividend increases and share buybacks. Obviously, as we transition to IFRS 17, we’ve been closely looking at what that means to our LICAT ratios and our surplus. And as we’ve shared in our presentation, we see that our LICAT ratio, based on rates as at the end of the year, appear to be — putting us in a position where we’ll have a higher LICAT ratio — slightly higher LICAT ratio of a couple of percentage points.
So we’re not really going to share much more than that at this point. I’d sort of hold out until we are able to really share much more details at our next earnings call on more data on that front.
Operator: The next question is from Nigel D’Souza from Veritas Investment Research.
Nigel D’Souza : I wanted to circle back on Asia and get a better sense of the underlying trends there. When I look at the last 4 quarters, premiums have just lowered, but it looks like that’s offset by higher profitability. I was wondering if you could speak to how much of the trend we see in 2023, you could attribute to mobility restrictions, how much you attribute to sentiment from market volatility and economic uncertainty? And how much you attribute to just changes in product mix? And how do you see those factors spinning out in 2023?
Damien Green: Nigel, thanks for the question. I think it’s all of those things. I mean apportioning is not necessarily easy to do. But I would say predominantly what’s impacted our results in Asia over the course of 2022 was the extended or lingering COVID containment measures in China and Hong Kong. These are both core businesses for us. And I think we saw those containment measures linger on well into 2022 in both Hong Kong and China. And that impacted consumer sentiment, economic growth and further constrained our growth opportunity in those markets in the year. Generally, though, I’d say that we did — through our focus on execution and resilience, we were able to post, as you know, year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter core earnings growth in the fourth quarter, despite the uneven kind of post-pandemic recovery there.
Underpinning that momentum was Hong Kong, where we saw quarter-on-quarter improvement in all key metrics in the fourth quarter; APE, core earnings and NBV. Japan continues its terrific turnaround, delivering high double-digit growth in core earnings quarter-on-quarter and for the full year. And the Asia Other grouping, we delivered a robust core earnings growth result also. So just to circle back and summarize, I think it very much — the constraints last year were driven by sentiment — external factor sentiment, capital market volatility And so far as product mix is concerned, probably only in China, that was a relevant factor where you can see our core earnings and NBV results in China. Whilst we’ve got some resilience coming through and we registered 4% growth in APE for the full year in China, which was extraordinary given the difficulties across the economy, what constrained us in terms of product mix were some one-off changes to the regulatory environment around critical illness products.
Key point there is those changes are probably good for the long term of the industry in terms of sustainability in China. They do not preclude us from undertaking margin enhancement. And indeed, that’s underway for us, and we feel quite optimistic about that in the first quarter and the first half of 2023. Thanks, Nigel.
