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Sell now or wait for US markets to open? I’ve doubled my money now and need to get stuff into isa really instead of standard trading account
£4.75 looking good
Rock on Amanda!
Oops! 470p exceeded already : )
Nice start to the day, comparing to LGEN, which fell but ended up recovering. I may have been too cautious with my 466p-470p range for today here
Squash, Canada & RoI have combined populations of ~43m (~64% the size of the UK) so you shouldn't simply discount them. The population of Australia is ~68% the size of Canada and its second largest insurer (SunCorp) is currently worth ~£7.5bn. AV is the second largest insurer in Canada (which has large agricultural, manufacturing & mining sectors), so it's conceivable that, on a pro-rata basis, AV's business in Canada could potentially be worth ~£11bn, all other factors being equal! Hardly small fry.
It goes without saying, given that the whole of AV has a current market valuation of ~£12.5bn there is significant upside to the potential valuation of AV.
What's not to like?
File:///C:/Users/eamor/Downloads/aviva-plc-annual-report-and-accounts-2023.pdf
Let's see how the market opens.
We all know that good results does not always equal good day.
That said huge SP uplift due here in the future for those interested in that sort of thing. Me ? - I've penciled in 36.1p dividend for FY24 (915m x 1.05)/ (2,740,000,000 - 60,000,000) - I've gone with buyback @ £5. That's 8% increase on 33.
4p :)
Wonder if the opening SP will be around £4.75 today?
What's everyone else thinking?
Wow that report was fantastic to read.
Aviva expected to report full-year operating profits of between £1.42-1.45bn, as per the life insurer's own guidance but they beat this - well done Aviva!
And
Divi up 8%
Expect the share price to rise significantly today.
So glad I have invested here and will be holding forever.
Cheers everyone,
Bob.
Profit above expectations should be a good day
Seems pretty impressive on first take. Certainly more positive then LGEN.
If my calcs are correct then with 2.5% share capital reduction and mid-single digits div cost growth, should see around 9-10% y/y dividend increase.
As this is already yielding c7% should see good sp growth particularly when interest rates start to decline.
Got my shareback and it reads well , Perhaps 35p dividend next year with interest rates declining at somepoint should see this head to £5 over 12mths, or most likely by end of this year, well done Aviva
Upgraded future dividend guidance. thank you, blanc.
Fantastic results but as expected so not sure how much the market has in for this?
Very healthy
I'll take that for my long term holdings.
""Final dividend per share of 22.3 pence (2022: 20.7 pence) giving a total dividend per share of 33.4 pence (2022: 31.0 pence), up 8%."
TheTrotsky you make some very valid points. I guess the way I am seeing it is the City fell out of love a long time ago with the UK Insurance sector and Aviva was a clunky business based on former mergers and takeovers plus all the overseas businesses. Previous CEO's including Richard Harvey, Mark Wilson and Maurice Tulloch failed to deal with the issues. Don't forget the CGNU/Aviva SP was over £11 twenty years ago so other than a decent dividend return the longterm shareholders have suffered. Therefore there was added pressure to do something with the overseas operations when AB arrived and only amplified when Cevian bought 6% and got very noisy about what direction they needed to go in. Then once the return of funds was complete Cevian disappeared. Now Aviva are just a smaller company and in a very limited market. Not a lot will come from Canada or Ireland so they now pretty much have all their egg in one basket - UK and as you correctly state no further acquisitions likely for the reasons you have given. Lets hope for a good set of results tomorrow (L&G disappointed today) but either way I am in it for the long haul purely as a dividend stock in my portfolio.
Squash, Be realistic. What was AV going to buy with £5bn? Given it's dominant market positions in the UK, RoI & Canada it was hardly going to be permitted to acquire other insurance rivals in those markets. The CMA are already crawling all over their proposed £0.5bn acquisition of AIG's UK protection business!
The fact is that short of buying another overseas insurance business, in which event AV would likely have had to spend more than £5bn to acquire a top 1/2 insurer in another major insurance market (consistent with its aim to be one of the top two insurers in the markets it serves) plus, since the Brexit referendum, £5bn doesn't go as far as it once did. For example, if AV had wanted to acquire one of the top two insurers in (say) Australia, namely QBE and Suncorp, it would probably have had to spend in excess of £10.5bn and £7.5bn respectively, before any divestments.
Not only that, I'm not sure AV's shareholders would have had the stomach for such a large overseas foray so soon after divesting most of its overseas businesses and increasing the size of the group by c30-40% in the process, particularly when you consider that there would probably have been limited cost savings and/or economies of scale from acquiring such well established market leaders. AV had already tried buying smaller overseas insurers and growing them organically, and look how that worked out (a real mish-mash).
AV's options were/are limited and Blanc now intends to grow the business going forward by buying and assimilating small, capital-light, bolt-on acquistions (generally less than £1bn), which can be funded out of its existing cash resources without having £5bn of cash just sitting on the balance sheet looking for a home. Personally, I think that's a recipe for disaster; you either become fixated on finding the "one" and often becoming increasingly desperate to do a deal at any cost as time goes by or splurge on a bunch of ad-hoc acquisitions all at once, often (at your investment banker's suggestion) outside your field of expertise (what do they care as long as they rake in the fees) and desperately try to assimilate them and squeeze out the projected cash savings (that never quite materialise).
Far better to return the excess capital to shareholders now and return to the market to raise additional capital at a later date if a, too good to miss, investment opportunity arises (at which time the shareholders get the chance to run the rule over the acquisition too). Excess cash sitting on the balance sheet looking for an investment rarely ends well in my experience. Make the investment bankers work for their corn; let them convince you that the investment is worth your while raising capital for rather them "doing you a favour" and digging you out of that hole of shareholder expectation as time elapses.
After ad good year for Protection (don't know about other markets) for Aviva, and seeing how L&G have done, my target price for tomorrow is 466p to 470p and div s/be 22.3p if aligned with H1 guidance, I think:
"We expect full year 2023 Group operating profit‡,1 to grow between 5% to 7% from £1,350m in 2022.
We are on track to exceed our Solvency II operating own funds generation‡ target of £1.5bn per annum by 2024 and our cash remittance‡ target of >£5.4bn cumulative (2022-24). We expect to deliver our target of £750m gross cost reduction by 2024 one year early.
We remain committed to delivering for our shareholders. Consistent with previous guidance, we expect to pay a dividend of c.£915m or c.33.4p for 2023, with low-to-mid single digit growth in the cash cost of the dividend thereafter."
Agreed it has to be the right purchases and I accept it was an international mish-mash of businesses that were sold. But those businesses still produced a combined several hundred million pounds worth of profit.
Something that will be missing from tomorrows results because due to pressure from Cevian who subsequently sold up pretty much all the liquidity from the sales was just given back to shareholders and a reduced share ownership. IMO a completely pointless exercise.
Depends on the quality of the acquisitions, and the prices paid for such …. previous aviva CEOs overpaid for a mish-mash of disparate assets that lacked focus and any meaningful synergy. blanc has been trimming away some of the accumulated nonsense.
I don't see the benefits of buybacks. Share price just drops accordingly or you end up with less shares in a smaller organisation. I would rather sensibly spend the money on acquisitions which generate larger profits in the future. The £5 billion return of funds previously just made Aviva smaller.
Share buy backs are not certain, it is just assumed they will do another one, don't count your chickens.
Thought they said 22.3p
I just hope after spending so much money on all these small acquisitions, they generate enough profit to pay for the annual buybacks , let’s hope we get one.