Damien Green: Yes. Thanks, Scott, for the question. Firstly, on the question of expenses, let me cover that briefly. We remain tightly focused on expense discipline and continue to track within our capital expense efficiency ratio target of 50% and did so for the full year of 2022 and for the fourth quarter. You will see some seasonality there, which we did see in the fourth quarter associated with us driving some business growth there. But generally, we’re hanging on fairly well there. In terms of competition across markets, the first thing I’d say is, I mean, just a macro view on our competitive performance through the pandemic. We’ve demonstrated considerable resilience through the pandemic in comparison to peers, growing our core earnings at a CAGR of 4% between 2019 being the immediate pre-pandemic year and to the end of last year’s reporting period 2022, pretty positive.
We remain the top 3 Pan-Asian insurer, and we’re a scaled player there operating in 11 markets. So typically, in terms of competitive dynamics, I’d have to say broadly, every market in Asia, whether it’s an emerging market or a more mature market like Hong Kong or Japan, has considerable competition and quite intense competition. But our scaled franchise, particularly in cornerstone markets like Hong Kong, where we’re a leader; Singapore, where we’re #2 in the market; Vietnam, where we have the leading franchise by far, gives us scale advantages and comparative scale advantages. So I think we’re very well equipped to continue to compete for the share of growth and value.
Scott Chan: And maybe one follow-up for Roy. Just on capital deployment. You kind of talked about 100% ownership. But I saw that you did a minority stake in a private equity firm in Asia. So it seems like the theme of deployment in Asia, as you talked about in the past, is important. I’m just curious within your maybe current JV ownerships or outside of that looking at other asset management and bank insurance. And maybe if you can kind of maybe talk about the pipeline now that Asia is reopening there?
Roy Gori: Yes. Thanks for the question. Scott, a couple of thoughts I’d leave you with. Firstly, we are in a strong capital position with a LICAT ratio of 1.31. We have $20 billion in excess of the supervisory minimum. So that really gives us certainly a lot of confidence, especially as we’ve navigated 3 challenging years through the pandemic and still an uncertain economic environment as we look to ’23 and beyond. But despite that, I think that capital strength has put us in a position to create value through the deployment of capital. In ’22, we basically bought back 4.1% of our outstanding shares or deployed $1.9 billion to share buybacks, which, again, we felt was a very prudent way to create value for shareholders. And our dividend increase, the CAGR of 10% from 2017 to ’22, again, was a source of value, and we’re proud to announce that the Board approved an 11% increase effective March of ’23.
So dividend buybacks — sorry, dividend increases and share buybacks have been really a large part of our focus from a capital deployment perspective. We think that, opportunistically, there may be M&A opportunities for us to consider. Although one of our unique opportunities is that we can grow and deliver against our targets without M&A, which I think has really meant that we can be more judicious and less reckless, quite honestly, with a deployment of capital to M&A. But despite that, we have deployed to various initiatives, including the MTEDA JV acquisition that you referenced, which is something we’re really excited about. In fact, we were the first foreign company to receive approval to acquire full ownership of a JV asset management company.
