Axa reported Thursday a record full-year profit as revenues grew for all businesses even as it maintained “discipline” on fees charged to clients.
Axa hiked its 2024 dividend payout by nine percent to 2.15 euros per share, and said it would buy back 1.2 billion euros of its own shares this year.
In addition, a further 3.8 billion euros ($4 billion) will be returned to shareholders via share buybacks once it closes the sale of its Axa Investment Managers business to BNP Paribas.
“Our group is now growing at a stronger pace, with robust revenue growth across all lines of business and geographies,” chief executive Thomas Buberl said in a statement.
Net profit climbed 10 percent to 7.9 billion euros, on revenue growth of seven percent, to 110 billion euros — also a record for the insurer.
However the group’s solvability ratio, a measure of its capacity to absorb financial shocks, fell by 11 percentage points from the end of 2023, to 216 percent.
Axa attributed the drop to increased spreads between sovereign bond issuance by various governments.
Finance chief Alban de Mailly Nesle told a conference call that “we are going to recover the points we lost… as our government bond holdings gradually reach maturity.”