Good afternoon, everybody, welcome to the Allianz conference call on the financial results of the second quarter, 2023. As always, let me start the call with the usual housekeeping, remind you that this conference call is being streamed live on allianz.com and YouTube, that a recording will be made available shortly after the call. If you want to ask a question after the presentation, you join us via web call, please click on the Talk Request button at the upper right-hand side of your screen. If you join us via telephone, please press star five. All right, that was all from my side for now, with that, I turn over the call to our CFO, Giulio Terzariol. Thank you, Oliver. Welcome from my side. I'm happy to present today the results for the first half of the year and also for the second quarter. Overall, as you have already seen, we had a strong six months result and also strong second quarter results. If we go to page three, we can see that the operating profit for the six months was EUR 7.5 billion, which is 15% over the prior period and also 6% above the outlook of EUR 14.2 divided by two. From a general point of view, I would say we had very solid results in P&C. I would say the development in commercial lines was really excellent. Also we have a good resilience in our retail business. Overall, the combined ratio for the six months is 92%. We are also benefiting from higher revenue and also from high investment income. Overall, almost EUR 4 billion operating profit coming from our Property Casualty line of business. In the Life Health business, we see results in line with the expectation, and this reflects clearly the quality of the in-force business. On the new business margin, we continue to have a strong new business margin, which broadly at the 6% level. That's a level which is even higher compared to the target of 5% that we set for ourself. On the asset management, in this case, clearly we know that because of the development that we observed, especially last year, the profitability has come down compared to a year ago. We still are reporting EUR 1.4 billion operating profit. We are still confident that we can get to the outlook of EUR 3 billion by year-end. Also that's important, we see some momentum from an inflows point of view, especially at PIMCO. The core net income is EUR 4.7 billion, which is 90% higher compared to last year. Clearly, here we need to adjust for the effect of Structured Alpha in 2022. Even if we do that, we get to an increase in core income of 15%, which is consistent with the operating profit development. Overall, a strong set of results, I would say, across across the different segment, especially under the current circumstances. Now if we go to the second quarter results at page five, you can see broadly a copy and paste of what happened in the first quarter over the six months, with strong operating profit coming from Property Casualty, r- results in line with expectation with Life Health. In Asset Management, we see an operating profit, which is reduced compared to last year, but pretty much in line with the operating profit that we had in Q1. The core net income is with EUR 2.5 billion, 23% higher compared to last year. That's a reflection of higher operating profit. We have less restructuring in the quarter compared to last year, and also we had some positive tax benefits. That's also been a driver for the core net income for the quarter. Again, I will go more in details clearly through these numbers in a second, but as I was saying before, a good six months and also a strong second quarter. We are also confident, clearly, as we look into the remainder of the year. Now, getting to the solvency ratio at page seven. The solvency ratio has improved by 3 percentage point. We should also remember that the numbers of the first quarter were not included in the deduction for the buyback of EUR 1.5 billion. From that point of view, there is even a stronger improvement to the solvency ratio. On the other side, we had also a net issuance of debt, which had a positive impact of 2%, but when you adjust for the buyback and for the net impact of the issuance of debt, there was still a 2 percentage point of negative impact in Q2 versus Q1. A nice delivery of the solvency capitalization. From a sensitivity point of view, they are basically unchanged compared to what, what we had in Q1. At page nine, we have, as always, the waterfall of the capital generation. I think what is good here is to see that the capital generation, the organic capital generation, is coming up strong. When you look at the business evolution on the requirement of EUR 0.3 billion, this business evolution is all coming from basically Property and Casualty. Right now we are in a situation, and we discussed this already a few times, where basically there is no real consumption or additional consumption of ICR coming from the life business. All in all, 208 of solvency ratio, this is a clear indication, clearly, that we have capital flexibility that we can deploy as we go into the remainder of the year and also as we look at 2024. Now we come, as always, to the segment view. I will say page 11 is, in my opinion, a very strong page. You can see that we have a very nice double-digit growth rate. You can also see that this growth rate is widespread, basically across all entities. I think also what is really good here is to see the acceleration of rate change or renewal is 7.4%. I can also tell you that in retail business we are close to 9%, and in commercial business we are north of 5%. From that point of view, I think this is a clear sign when you look at the rate change or renewal, when you look at internal growth, that there is a strong push in order to offset the inflation that we have been clearly seeing over the last 12 months. That's, in my opinion, the most relevant page, I would say, as we think about the performance of the property casualty business, especially as we think about the performance, as we move into the second part of the year, and also as we think about 2024. At page 13, we come to the development of the operating profit, which is up EUR 200 million compared to last year. Here we have higher revenue. We have also a lower combined ratio, and then also, as we are going to see in a second, we have a better investment income. All the 3 component together have led to this 11% increase in operating profit. When we look at the combined ratio, we can see that in commercial lines, we have a very strong performance of 86.3%, and this is a reflection on also the environment. We know that profitability in commercial line is generally very strong, but that's also a reflection of all the activities that we have undertaken over the last two, three years. On retail business, you can see that the combined ratio is holding compared to the quarter of last year. Here there is clearly some pressure coming from inflation, but on the other side, we are taking rate increases, so overall the combined ratio is holding pretty nicely. If we move to page 15, we can take a look at the profitability by companies. Clearly, there are a few companies where the performance is lagging behind, like in the United Kingdom or in Australia, to a certain degree we could say Spain. I can also say that, generally the performance is lagging behind in countries where there is some real pressure. You can see this also on the disclosure coming from public companies listed in those countries. On the other side, we see also a lot of strong combined ratio. If I should highlight the combined ratio, is clearly the combined ratio of AGCS with 88.3% for the quarter. If you look at the six months, which is always a more representative measure from my standpoint, we have a combined ratio of 90.8. That's a good development. This is not only AGCS. We saw strong performance across our commercial lines in general. Overall, I would say good combined ratio for the segment and also a lot of entities performing at a nice level. As always, there are a few entities where there is some room for improvement, but we're also taking action, so we are pretty confident that we're going to see better performance pretty soon also in those entities. We come to the investment results at page 17, which is EUR 80 million up compared to the second quarter of last year. Here you can see clearly the benefit coming from higher interest rates. This benefit is partially offset by the interest rate accretion, but net net, we are still clearly ahead of prior period. When you look at the economic investment yield, it is over 4%. That's also something that clearly should help as we move into, into the second part of the year and as we think about 2024. All in all, I would say very strong results in property casualty, good performance in commercial lines, a very good performance in commercial lines, good resilience in retail. We have growth, we have acceleration, rate increases, we have investment income picking up, there are a lot of clearly strength, and this helps also clearly to offset the inflation that we are currently seeing in some part of the business. Coming to the life business, I will say that the new business margin is pretty strong, at 6%. This is a reflection, clearly, of the fact that we are not basically sacrificing performance in order to give higher guarantees. We are holding definitely the line, and to this point, we are getting clearly the benefit also of a higher interest rate environment. From a production point of view, you can see that in some geography, production is down compared to what we had last year, but we are not necessarily unhappy with the absolute level of production that we are achieving. Then you can see a nice dynamic in the United States with a 20% growth coming from Allianz Life. All in all, when you put all the numbers together, we see stability of new business margin at a good level and, and, and increase in value in new business. I would like to tie this conversation to the CSM development. Overall, the normalized growth in CSM and the normalized growth in CSM is the sum of CSM on new business expected in first return and CSM release. Overall, we see for the quarter a growth of 1.5%. If you analyze this number, that would indicate 6% normalized growth on an annualized basis. If you look at the six months, which is always a little bit more representative because it's kind of smoothing some noise that you might have between quarters, we get to an annualized growth of 5%. From that point of view, we have now the impression that our normalized growth might be a little bit stronger compared to the 4% that we have been indicating previously. Again, this is a new measure, new metric, so we want clearly to observe how this CSM is going to develop over the next quarters before we achieve a definitive conclusion. Based on what we see right now, it might be that our normalized CSM growth is going to be more towards 5% and not towards 4%. Now, coming to the operating profit at page 23, there is in general, an expectation that the operating profit should be in line with the CSM release, because the other elements have a tendency to offset each other, besides for some noise coming from operating investment results. You can see that in the second quarter, this is the case. There is always some clearly volatility around, the number, but fundamentally, you can see there is a, a strong, correlation between the CSM release and the operating profit, as expected. For the second quarter of 2022, this is not the case, but we discussed that already in the last quarter call. That's because of the first time implementation of IFRS 17, and this has created some accounting noise for Allianz Life. When you look at the six months for the Life business, we have an operating profit of $2.5 billion, which is exactly in line with the expectation. Now, if you go to page 25, you can see the, the picture by companies. Again, here, what is eye-catching is the development in the United States. Again, this has to do with the effect on last year. Otherwise, you know, you see stable, stable numbers in generally in the quarter-over-quarter comparison. All in all, I would say strong results also from our Life business. We have a new accounting framework. We are learning the new accounting framework. I can personally tell you I like it, and I think that this is really a good way to get some insights in the development of the business, especially also as you look at the CSM development over time, and also as you look at the operating profit and the different component of the operating profit, how they are moving over time. With that, we come to asset management. Asset management, the third-party assets under management are basically stable compared to the level of the first quarter. We compare the current level to the one that we had at the beginning of the year, we are even 2% higher. We can see that in general, there is some stability, which is not been the case in 2022. From that point of view, we get comfort that the kind of pressure we saw from rates going up in 2022 should not necessarily repeat in 2023, and this should bring the needed stability in our results moving forward. If you go to page 29, we can look at the evolution of the third-party assets under management. You can see that there were some flows at Ping An in the second quarter of about EUR 4 billion. I can also tell you that there was some sort of acceleration towards the end of the quarter, and then we saw a positive flow, so EUR 6 billion in July. From that point of view, we might be at this kind of inflection point that we discussed already in prior calls. When you go then to page 31, on the development of the revenue, they are clearly down compared to last year. That's because of the basis effect of, you know, 12 months of reduction assets under management. When you look at internal growth, in reality, it's pretty moderate. We're down, we're minus 2%, and this is more or less consistent between Ping An and AGI. What is eye-catching in this slide is the, the development of the fee margin at AGI, which is significantly reduced compared to the level of last year. This has to do with the Voya transaction. From that point of view, clearly we have less assets and also especially assets that had a high margin. On the other side, we don't have also the cost associated to that business. From that point of view, you cannot take a reduction in fee margin and assume this is a, that this is a reduction in profitability one to one. That's much less the reduction profitability than what might look based on this fee margin reduction. At page 33, on the operating profit, we have a reduction of operating profit of 7%. This is actually in line with the expectation. So from that point of view, there is no surprise, and that's also broadly in line with the first quarter. When you look at the six months together, we have an operating profit for the segment of EUR 1.4 billion, a little bit more than EUR 1.4 billion. Our outlook for the year is EUR 3 billion, so we are confident that we can get to the outlook, and the reason for that is, A, we see some momentum building up. From also from a flows point of view, we saw stability in the assets under management in Q2 versus Q1, and also, as you know-... usually the majority of the performance fees or higher proportion performance fees is coming in Q4 compared to Q3, compared to what you have in Q1, Q2. When you put all this together, we should be able to achieve our outlook of EUR 3 billion, starting from the EUR 1.4 billion that we have right now. Corporate, I will not spend much time, is in line with the expectation, indeed, a little bit better compared to our expectation. I would come to the core income at page 37, which is up over 20% compared to last year. Here, as I was saying at the beginning of the presentation, we have a contribution coming from operating profit. You can see also that the restructuring are significantly lower compared to last year. Last year, we had the impact due to the Voya transaction, and there were restructuring associated to it. Also we had some lower tax rates, which is partially due to one-off. Some part of it is due to seasonality, let's call it this way. All in all, we get to a significant increase in core net income. If you look at the EUR 4.7 billion of core net income for the six months, I think that's a good representation of a normalized level of core net, net income. If you annualize that, you get to EUR 9.4 billion-EUR 9.5 billion. That could be an expectation, you know, based on the level of performance that we see coming through right now. In summary, a strong set of results for the quarter and also for the six months, with growth in business volume. This is mostly coming from P&C, which is exactly where we like to see growth. It's driven by clearly rate changes that we are implementing. We see a nice development of the operating profit. We always should also keep in mind that last year we had a record operating profit, so we are building up strong growth on results, which were pretty, pretty good to start with. Also the solvency ratio, 208, is at a level that give us clearly comfort as we think about capital deployment moving forward. Good set of results, and I'm happy to get your questions now. All right. Thanks, Giulio, for the presentation. We will now take your questions. The first question comes from Andrew Sinclair, from Bank of America. Andy, please go ahead. Your line is open now. Afternoon. Thanks, everyone. Three from me as usual, please. First is on P&C. I'll, I'll go to the slide, Giulio, that you were pointing to as the main one. Good figures for rate changes across the board. Just wondered if you could comment, really, where do you think that, that margins are now, rates are now at an acceptable level, that you can push a little bit more for volume, that where pricing has reached a suitable level? In particular, I was just wanting to dig into a little bit on Allianz Partners, where there seems to be a huge acceleration of rate in Q2, up 2.3% in Q1, 11.6 for the six months. Is just interested on thoughts on that. That's my first question. Second was on, on life and health. Germany seemed to have a really pretty big drop in sales. Just wonder if you can give us a little bit more color on, on what's happening there to business that you'd have otherwise captured. Likewise, are you seeing any impact on, on lapses? The third question was just on the solvency, then 208%, great ratio. How should we think about that compared to, say, cash and ability to put that to work? That's 3 from me. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Maybe I start from the last one, the 208, and how it compares to cash. Again, on a cash side, we are in a very comfortable position, so that's also important because you might have a strong solvency ratio, but if you don't have a lot of liquidity, there is not much you can do about that. We see that, you know, we get the cash remittances that we're getting from the OEs are consistent with our plan. You're going to see also the numbers at the end of the year. From a cash position, we are in a definitely in a solid position. We don't have any particular constraint, let's put it this way, in deploying capital, based on the solvency ratio that we see and also based on the capital position that the liquidity position that we have. On the liquidity, I would like also to stress something. If you, if you look at our track record over time, is you can see a very stable amount of cash remittances, and I would always link that to the quality of the franchise. And also just think about, as a managers, and let's forget about the incident with Structured Alpha, but as a manager producing a EUR 3 billion operating profit, you put that after tax, and that basically a dividend that you're going to get 1 to 1. We have a company here in Germany, Stuttgart. They are producing EUR 700 million-EUR 800 million of dividend. We are extremely confident we are going to get that amount of dividend. We have APKV, which is a health business. There are other EUR 150 million dividends. You get EUR 1 billion of dividend, which I will say, call it "guaranteed," between inverted comma, from this entity here in Germany. Germany P&C is a strong contributor to our dividend. From that point of view, when you put all together, you know that we are already starting basically every year with this amount of dividend, which is basically sure. That, that's something very important to remember. On the other one, which is the topic regarding Leben, what is happening with the production there. First of all, there is an element which is a little bit actuarial. When we show the present value in the business premium here, the calculation is, is done on a present value basis, which means when rates go high, high, you have, basically a lower present value in the business premium. If you look at the comments that we put in the presentation, the minus 18% that you see there, in reality is more like -8. From that point of view, it's still a negative number, but not as negative as it might look like, just by looking at the headline number. What is happening there, clearly in the bank insurance channel, production is currently lower. The reason is the bank, banks are pushing other products, or maybe they are not pushing any product at all because they're happy to get the spread on the deposit. That's the only area where we are kind of seeing lower production. In the broker channel or in the agency channel, actually, production is coming as expected. For me, what is important is not so much whether we are going up and down compared to a prior quarter or prior year, is whether the amount of production we are getting is enough in order to ensure that we have enough scale, that we, you know, we have enough meat on the bones, and I can tell you that is absolutely the case. You know, I was the CFO of Allianz Life, and I was used to see volatility up and down, but for me, the most important thing was to have a, a certain amount of production, and this is the amount of production that we get in general on our life business is enough. You can see this also reflected in the CSM, where we are still creating basically a CSM inception, which is broadly in line with the CSM release. We just need to get a little bit more, more growth, and then, you know, the picture is going to look extremely, extremely very positive from my standpoint. On lapses, we don't see lapses, especially we don't see lapses in, in Germany. In Germany, basically, there, there is zero lapsation. We don't see... We saw some lapses in prior quarters in France. They are moderating. In Italy, you see some lapses in the bank insurance channel, but, you know, it's not the majority of our business. We have also 50% of that business only. In reality, it's not really a problem from our standpoint. When you look at the CSM evolution, actually, we don't see any impact on our CSM evolution because of higher, higher lapses. From that point of view, I would say lapse, which was an issue at the beginning of the quarter or at the beginning of the year, also because of what happened in the US, shouldn't be a concern as we look at our, at our numbers. Then you had a question on the P&C margin. You know, the question was whether we can push now for growth as opposed to keep the profitability. First of all, as long as, you know, there is, you know, noise around inflation, and we need to second-guess what inflation might be doing, we are going to be on the cautious side. From that point of view, that's not the time where you make experiments. That's my tactical answer to the current situation. Fundamentally, I personally always struggle with the idea to gain market share by changing profit target or, you know, changing pricing because every time you do that, you end up in very dangerous territory. If you want to gain market share, you do that by having a superior business model, by having better customer service, by doing all these kind of things. Using the price element to gain market share, that can be something that helps you for a quarter or two, and then you pay everything back. Fundamentally, it's not a strategy that resonates, let's say, here at Allianz. And then you had a specific question about the health business about Allianz Partners and the renewal change. This is coming from the health business of Allianz Partners. We have a, you know, a sort of in, it's not a long-term short business, it's more a short-term, term health business. In that case, there is also some inflation coming through, and that's the reason why you see also price changes coming through in order to make sure that we can keep the profitability at the desired level. I hope this helps. Yeah, very detailed. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right. Thanks, Andy, and we will take the next question from Peter Eliot from Kepler Cheuvreux. Peter, please go ahead. The line is open. Thank you very much. I had a couple of questions on Life, please, and one on the corporate segment. Appreciate that Life is, sort of 50% of the full-year outlook and therefore in line, but, I guess you're normally quite conservative in the outlook, and I, I'm not really aware of any sort of major headwinds in H1. I'm just wondering, you know, whether this is a fair reflection of the run rate, or whether you were a bit less conservative or whether there's sort of, you know, any reason that, you know, a run rate might be slightly better than we're seeing at the moment? Just wondering if you could elaborate on that. Then, the second one, also on Life. If I look at the slide 21 of the, the CSM, the, the expected in-force return on the CSM, even if I adjust for the true up, we're still at EUR 700 for the quarter, which is much higher than Q1. I'm just wondering if you can help me understand, you know, what, why that is and, and what the right ongoing level is. Then finally, on the corporate segment, I appreciate you, you said it sort of roughly in line, but I, I guess it was, it was, you know, quite a decent beat against consensus, especially if you annualize that. Looking at it, I'm sort of thinking, well, the alternatives may be benefited from slightly higher dividends, but I, I'm struggling to see any other one-offs. I'm just wondering if there are any one-offs there or if that's a sort of sustainable result. Thank you very much. No, thank you for your question. Starting from the life business, I understand the first question was about the, basically the outlook with... Okay. You know, the point on the profitability in the life business on the operating profit is pretty sticky. There are pros and cons. In the sense, you should not expect this operating profit to go down, you know, and maybe some volatility, but fundamentally, the operating profit should go up, but it's not going to go up in a accelerated way. You can basically expect that the performance during a year is going to be pretty sticky, and you're not going to see a major difference in the operating profit in Q1 versus Q4. If you want to be very technical, there should be a little bit of an increase, but we are speaking here really of rounding. That's a little bit the way to look at that. The performance is going to be relatively sticky, gradually increasing, but we are at EUR 2.5 billion at six months. Yes, one could make the argument should be a little bit higher than EUR 5 billion by the end of the year, but it's not going to be EUR 5.1 billion. It should be a little bit higher than that. You have always the noise around the calculation. Think about a measure which is gradually going up, and there is a lot of stickiness, and this comes with the advantage that you should not have negative surprises, that suddenly this profit is vanishing. On the other side, is something that is building up over time. This is something that, if you ask me, that deserves definitely a different cost of capital compared to what the, I don't know, the market is doing. I hope that over time, the, this level of confidence is going to come, come through, because that's really a stable increase in profit over time, and there is not much risk that this profit... You can have volatility, but there is no risk that this profit is going to go away, and then, you know, you are in a totally different situation. That's on the life. Then you had a question on the CSM. Yes, okay, so you are right. Even if we adjust for the, let's say, for the true up, let's call it this way, in Q2, we are EUR 700 million for the expected in the enforced return for the quarter. Another way to look at that, which is the same point you are making, you can look at the 6, six months, and basically we get to something which is around the EUR 1.4 billion of expected enforced return. This points out that we should have more enforced return compared to what we thought in when we did the first release around our IFRS 17 profit, we guided to something up to EUR 2.5 billion. I will say, based on what we see, it might be that we are going to be even a little bit north of this EUR 2.5 billion. The reason for that is, first of all, the fact that rates have come up is creating anyway a stronger unwinding of the CSM. The other point is also we are getting a little bit more over return compared to what we have modeled initially. As on now, I will say there could be a fair expectation that we are going to be ahead of what we, what we thought and we told you. Since this is a new calculation, I will really always be cautious and see what happens in Q3 and Q4. As on now, yes, this will be our perception that we are going to be ahead compared to what we told you, told you before. You had a question regarding the corporate business. On the corporate business, I, and I, I think we said this a few times, you know, the outlook that we have, it's, for, for the year is EUR 800 million. We also said this is the part where we also put some contingency or explicit contingency. From that point of view, I would say it's not surprising that we are going to be better than a EUR 200 million per quarter. I would also anyway consider that, there is always some more expenses coming towards the end of the year. I, I would say the number you see there, it's, if you were to ask me, it's EUR 40 million better compared to what an expectation might, might be. You know, EUR 40 million is, we are speaking of, of a nuance here. Yeah, keep in mind that there is some conservatism in the outlook that we put forward for the corporate segment. That was it, yeah? Yeah. Yes, it was perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. We will take the next question from Andrew Ritchie, Autonomous. Andrew, please go ahead. Your line is open. Cool. Hi there. A couple of questions. Could you just clarify, when I look at the commercial P&C result, it's helpful you, you break this out consistently now. I, I can see it's improved year-on-year, but, but it doesn't look like, you know, guessing what the discount effect would be year-on-year, the X discounting, it's improved year-on-year. Just give us a bit of color as to how you judge it, or maybe there's some additional conservatism, particularly in the commercial, reflected on the undiscounted basis. That's the first question. Second question. On solvency, I can see looking at your sensitivities, particularly in the, the full stress scenario, that that continues to sort of trend down, as in the, the downside is falling. Is that just a reflection of market conditions, or are you still doing some underlying de-risking or optimization? The final question: do you have any updates? You provided us some color back in Q1 around the group's real estate and alternative exposure. In light of there's more debate on those assets, I've seen, I think, only one reference to a small negative impact from real estate in the French CSM development. Have what's the latest in terms of the group having looked at overall at your latest thinking on any stress areas in real estate/alternatives and any update on things to think about there? Thanks. Yeah. No, thank you for the question. Also starting from commercial lines, I, I will say that, clearly there is also some benefit coming from the discounting. I will say, if you look at the six months, you can see that for, for the group in total, we have about 2 percentage point of higher discounting. I will say this is also something that you can imply for the commercial segment. Regardless of discounting and impact coming from that, the performance that we see right now in commercial lines is very, very strong. From that point of view, as you know, we put a lot of effort in improving the performance of GCNS. We always told you that we were kind of conservative on disclosing the real combined ratio of GCNS. I can tell you that we still put some reserves on top in the course of the second quarter. From that point of view, we see a very good performance at AGCS, and also, this is not only AGCS. Keep in mind, we did a lot of cleaning in Germany Mid-corporate last year. We did a lot of cleaning in France, too. Now you see basically the benefit of all this action coming through, and that's explained basically the performance that we see right now in commercial lines. On the de-risking, I would say we are not necessarily doing any additional major de-risking as we speak. From that point of view, there is no major change that we are making compared to the situation in Q1 or the situation at the end of the year. From that point of view, I will say, what is also helping somehow is that clearly the markets are on a positive trajectory, and this usually tends to have a positive impact on the solvency ratio and also clearly then on the sensitivity, too. To a certain degree, sensitivity, solvency, ratio level are related. As the market is more positive, you get more solvency ratio, you get better sensitivity, and the other way around. Now to with reference to the real estates valuation, I will say there is a reference that we made regarding France. I can also tell you the sensitivity of the CSM to a 10% decrease in valuation of real estate is about 1.5%, so it's not really meaningful. The point is, we have a substantial future discretionary benefits, and that's something very important because usually when we put alternative assets, we put some of the alternative assets also clearly in our Property and Casualty business on the surplus, on the net asset value side. The majority of the assets that we are holding as alternative assets are going to be on the policyholder accounts. Always keep in mind that there is a significant amount of discretion in the way we clearly then benefit the policyholder. From that point of view, yes, we might see some pressure coming from real estate. To a certain degree, we have already seen some reduction in the valuation of the real estate. As you look at our numbers, in reality, there is not much happening, and that's again, because of the, the, remarkable amount of future discretionary benefits. If you go into our, the interim reports, I don't remember which page. You remember? I think 48, page 48. 48, you're going to find a small footnote where we say what is the amount of future discretionary benefits that we have. That's EUR 100 billion+. In the future, don't be surprised if we're going to start emphasizing these amounts stronger also in our presentation, because I think this is a critical component to understand really the economics of the, of the life business. I hope this helps. Great. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. We will take the next question from Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Michael, please go ahead. Your line is open. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Thanks, thanks, Oliver. Thanks, Giulio. I had one general question because you seem so generous today, well, you're always generous, on cash. I don't have all the numbers and, I've got them wrong anyway. I just wondered, maybe you can explain in very broad terms, how you think about cash and because you mentioned the word capital management. I always get very excited. The impression I have is cash flow in the year, somewhere between EUR 7.5 billion and EUR 8 billion on a sustainable basis. You have the dividend, I'm guessing here, you know, a bit over 400 million shares, maybe consensus, somewhere around 12, somewhere around EUR 4.9 billion left. You've got EUR 1.6 billion, EUR 4.8, EUR 2.6 billion left. You've, you've, you've done a buyback or you have a buyback of EUR 1.5 billion, it takes you EUR 1 and a bit billion. Clearly here, is that it, or is there think about deals. You kind of think, oh, we only have EUR 1 billion for deals or, or potential extra capital management, or is there something I'm, I'm missing here? That would be really, really. The second question, which is kind of related, the 3% normalized organic capital generation net of dividend, up from 2% in Q1. Can you, can you say, is this sustainable? Can we put 12% for the year or something? Maybe you can say where it's coming from. Thank you so much. No, thank you for the question, coming from cash, first of all, we like cash, and we like cash immunity, so that's fundamentally the starting point. In terms of number, if I look at the flows of cash, in the Capital Markets Day, we, we guided you to EUR 23 billion of cash remittances. This is after the deduction of holding cost and interest. This EUR 23 billion is for the three years period. We are pretty confident that we are going to get this EUR 23 billion of cash remittances coming from our company. That's the way you need to think about remittances. It's pretty much consistent with what we told you in the Capital Markets Day, 2020, 2021. Then you need always to assume that, clearly we have also cash here at the holding level. From that point of view, I believe between the cash that we have at the holding level and also the flows that we, we can rely on, we feel very good about our liquidity position. I would say that's indeed one of the strength that we have. Also keep in mind that, since we are running the insurance or the reinsurance operation together with the holding operation, in reality, we have always, always access also to other element of cash. From a risk management point of view, we don't do that, but in reality, there is a lot of additional cash that could be available at the group level if if needed, but I don't think we will ever need to go to go there. The position is actually pretty, pretty comfortable. On the capital generation, your question is good. Should we see more than 10%? I, I, I believe eventually, yes, because on the life side, there is no reason why we are going, we are not going to get even slightly better, if you want, although you're not going to see a massive change from one year to the other, right? There is nothing which is tectonic here. It's always kind of steady, but fundamentally, one might expect that the development on the life business is going to incrementally be positive. Then on the P&C business, it's a matter of growth. If right now, we are growing pretty strongly, so you see a premium growth of 10%. If that growth is coming down because inflation is coming down, automatically, and we, we keep the margin clearly at the level that we, we want, automatically, we should see a higher generation. Fundamentally, I will say yes, one could expect that the 10% is going to become higher, but okay, let's see what happens, but don't, don't, don't think this number is going to become 15% within 1 year. It can go gradually up, and that will be the expectation. What is relevant really is the growth in P&C. There is always this notion that P&C is not capital intensive, but at the end of the day, we need to put about 25% of ECR for one premium growth that we have. Keep always in mind, if we are growing EUR 1 billion, you put EUR 250 million of ECR on top of what you had before. Does this help? Superb. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, Michael, and thanks for the compliment. We will take the next question from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Vinit, please go ahead. Your line is open. Yes, good afternoon. Yes, thank you very much, Giulio. For me, two questions on the non-life, please, and 1 on PIMCO. Just on the non-life, if I go back to the combined ratio slide, by market, you know, slide 15 today. I mean, the Germany seems to have some bit of a more cautious commentary. It seems to be suggesting, when I read the text that there was inflation in motor property, but also more favorable runoff in nat cats that seem to have helped this. I just want to just hear your thoughts on Germany. That's the first question on this slide. The second one is AGCS. I mean, when I see 88%, my mind goes back to we are struggling to get to 100. I know this is including the captives and fronting, but there seems to be a lot of improvement from MidCorp, where you went it from where 79% combined ratio. Could you comment on MidCorp? Is it because I know a lot of your peers as well want to do MidCorp, and is there more competition? Is that something that has driven this AGCS numbers materially? Any thoughts on MidCorp and AGCS? The last one is, I think you probably missed it. The PIMCO has high performance fees, and you did answer to Andy Sinclair earlier, but also you said that the PIMCO flows in July, sorry, flows in June were turning around. Do you have a number for July for PIMCO by any chance? Thank you very much. Yes, okay. For, for PIMCO, the number for July is EUR 6 billion of inflows. I can also tell you in May, we had EUR 1 billion of inflows in PIMCO, that the pickup towards EUR 3 billion, more or less, in June, and now we see EUR 6 billion in July. You might say this might be the beginning of a trend. Like to think this way. Let's see what happens in August. Definitely, we saw basically, over the last three months, we saw basically almost EUR 10 billion of flows coming from PIMCO. There is a nice momentum there, we see clearly what happens in the following months. It, it is logical to assume that there should be momentum coming through, because the anxiety about rates going up should be much reduced compared to a few months ago. Now if you buy a fixed income portfolio, I will say you invest in a fixed income portfolio, you get some nice return. We should never forget that PIMCO is really a strong franchise, so if you want to put your money in fixed income, definitely you want to consider PIMCO as a strong, strong option. I'm not so sure about the question performance fees. There was a question regarding performance fees. I mean, it felt a bit high for so early in the year. Yeah, there is. Yeah, no, I understand. Okay, good point. Yeah, there were some more performance fees in Q2, which is a good sign fundamentally. From that point of view, you are right. I would say the performance fees in Q1 is something that we saw already in the past. The performance fees in Q2 are a little bit stronger. To a certain degree, there could be also an anticipation of some performance fees that we might see later, but we're still kind of positive that, you know, generally the stronger amount of performance fees is going to come towards the end of the year. There is always some uncertainty around that, when you look at the market conditions and so on, they seem to be supportive for a good performance fee level for the year 2023. To your question regarding... I I think there was a question regarding Germany and the AGCS. On Germany, I'm not so sure I got the question, but I can speak in general about Germany. We see, you know, when you look at the quarter, we see a combined ratio of 90%. If you look at the six months, we see a combined ratio of 89%, so it's pretty stable around 90. I would say what we see, so it's a good performance. What we see in Germany, there is some pressure coming on the retail side. From that point of view, clearly on the retail side, we need to pay attention that we are going to make the right moves in order to preserve profitability. We see good performance in the commercial lines, which is also the results, as I was saying before, the action that we undertook in basically last year in 2021. That's the reason why you see basically this, this level of performance, which is pretty, pretty, pretty good with a combined ratio of about 89%-90%. There is definitely some work to do in order to make sure that we can keep the performance at this level in a country which is clearly very important for us, considering the size. On your question regarding AGCS and MidCorp, I would say the profitability that you see in MidCorp, which is very good, is not just the AGCS part, which is, MidCorp and AGCS is the U.S. part of the business. They are also performing nicely in this environment. In general, we see strong performance in MidCorp, and that's been an area of focus over the last few years. When I'm referring to the actions that we have been taking in France or the actions that we've been taking in Germany, I'm referring exactly to the MidCorp business. That's also, so we see good performance, and as you, as you know, we are now also putting together, if you want, from a steering point of view, from a management point of view, AGCS, together with our MidCorp business, and we think this should help us in the future to get more growth, because we can be more consistent in the approach to the brokers. We can also tap more into some markets that we were not servicing before. Also, we believe we might get some efficiency gain. If you ask Oliver Bäte, he's going to... There's an expectation that we're going to get a lot of efficiency gains coming from putting together things. Then also, we believe that we can get to to a better also technical results. We're also investing actually in infrastructure, if you want, to make sure that we have a state-of-the-art business in our MidCorp and corporate business. Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you, Vinit. All right, we will take the next question from William Hawkins, KBW. Well, please go ahead. Your line is open. Hi, Giulio. Thank you for taking my questions. First of all, are, are there any noteworthy changes in investment allocation that you've been making through this year? Generally, the disclosure on that side is quite quiet, so I'm just wondering if there's anything interesting happening. Secondly, please, I, I'm sorry if I'm missing some detailed disclosure somewhere, but, in your financial supplement, you- you're confirming that there's been a positive reversal of net flows for the life business, so we're back in positive territory after three quarters of negative flows. I, I can't see the breakdown of that. I'm sorry if I've missed it. Can you just be a little bit clearer about what's driving that return to positive flows? You know, some of your peers are still seeing outflows in places like Italy and France. I'm not sure if you're actually in a better place in those markets or if you're still having outflows there, but there's good stuff going on elsewhere. A bit more color around the shift from negative to positive flows in the life business, please. Then lastly, third question. I'm sorry about this old chestnut, can you just remind me how you're managing Allianz from the point of view of the combined ratio that you care about? You know, in the first half, is it the 92% headline, or is it the 95% if we ignore discounting? And from that baseline, do you have a general view? You know, there's a lot of moving parts, some positive, some negative, over the next few years. Is this combined ratio a figure that should be improving from here? Or, you know, could you be allowing it to get a bit worse in inverted commas, because it's already pretty good, and you can have growth and higher interest, higher interest rates and that kind of thing? The outlook, you know, beyond this year for the combined ratio, please. Yeah. Well, thank you for your question, William. On the investment allocation, it was basically no change in the investment allocation. That's, yeah, answer is very simple. Nothing really material happening. On the net flows, I would say they are coming, especially from USA, where you see there is a strong growth rates there. Also Asia. Asia is a geography where we have a tendency anyway to see flows, there was, we say to a certain degree, a little bit of an acceleration coming from Asia. We see also flows basically in Germany. These are the three geography basically, which are somehow showing a dynamic, which is explaining the positive flows. I would say the primary driver is the development in the United States. This is what is clearly making a little bit the difference compared to what we had in prior quarters. On your question regarding the combined ratio, I, I would say, look, we, we look at combined ratio on a undiscounted basis. We look at combined ratio also on a discounting basis, you know, so there is a lot of thinking, clearly, about, you know, how this combined ratio is moving. I will not discount the discounted combined ratio, because to a certain degree, if you want, that's the rights economic view. To a certain degree, you know, actuaries were used anyway to put into the price and the potential increase in interest rates. From that point of view, I think you need really to look at both dimensions, and then you need to think, right? Then there is also a reality coming from the marketplace. That's how we do it, so I will not give you an answer one way or the other. Clearly, in an environment, we're looking at the undiscounted combined ratio. Stressing the undiscounted combined ratio might lead to a better outcome. We are going to stress the undiscounted combined ratio. I can tell you internally, I can tell you, I can see a situation that goes the other way around, where we're going to stress the discounting combined ratio. You want to be also little bit tactical, clearly, as you manage, you know, the relationship and the targets with the OEs. From a expectation point of view, we are going definitely to have conversation with our subsidiaries, how we can improve our combined ratio moving forward. From that point of view, our ambition will be anyway, to be able to improve this combined ratio moving forward. You know, before we make statement about 2024, I think it's fair to go through the planning cycle with the OEs, but you can imagine that our ambition is anyway, to move forward and not to go backwards. Thank you. Giulio, may I just clarify? Sorry. Italy and France. Again, I'm sorry if this is disclosed somewhere, and I've missed it, but are Italy and France still having outflows in the second quarter? And if so, are they better or worse than the first quarter? I know that we have outflows in France, and I will say they are broadly in line with the development that we saw in previous quarter. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Will. If you like, I have all the details for you later, okay? All right, we are running out of time, I will take questions from two more analysts who did not have the chance to ask them yet. That's Thomas and Ashik. We start with Thomas Fossard from HSBC. Thomas, please go ahead. The line is open for you. Yes, good afternoon, everyone. I've got 2 question on the U.K. market. Slide 16, Giulio, I can see your comments saying that actually, the U.K. market is still, the environment is still difficult. Do you see some improvement already? I, I was seeing your 17% price increase. Can you talk a bit about the direction in terms of momentum and what we should expect now going forward in terms of combined ratio development in the U.K.? Related to, related to the question, any comments you could offer on the FCA Consumer Duty and the implication on the ancillary income, if you've got any? Thank you. I can tell you on the second question, not capable to give an answer right now. On this one, we should do some follow-up. Maybe Oliver can follow up on that one. On the first one, which was regarding the UK, we are getting clearly looking for substantial rate increases in the UK. You saw that rate change on renewal 17%. We can tell you that in the case of retail, we are basically approaching the 20% rate changes. From that point of view, I, I think we are coming to a point where clearly the rate changes are going to be enough to offset the inflation that we see. The expectation for the year is still to be more or less in line with the 96.8 that you see here for, for the quarter. We might be slightly better and trend toward 96 for the full-year. Then next year, clearly, we expect to be at a combined ratio of 95 or below. You know, it all depends on the inflation amount that we, we see. In the UK, it's been pretty pronounced. What I can, can say that rate changes, we are pushing through substantial, so it's hard to imagine that we are now going to see stability at least. Let's start from there, and then also an improvement as we go into 2024. I can thank you. Thank you. All right, we will take the last question for today from Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley. Ashik, please go ahead. The line is open. Thank you, Oliver, and hello, Giulio. Just a couple of short questions, again, related to the P&C rate change. I mean, see, you delivered a fantastic growth in P&C, so nothing, not complaining that your growth was low, but a big part of the rate, a big part of the growth is just rate, basically. It feels like organic growth in terms of volumes was still low. When do you think that you will pick up on volume growth as well? That's the first question. The second one is, I mean, you mentioned that on the rate change, retail was 9%, and I guess it is probably flattered by UK, but I mean, 9% is certainly a number that I have not heard from anyone except some of the UK names. Can you just give us some color, what is this rate change ex UK? It is a very good number, and would you say there is any excess margin in that 9%, or is it mainly just covering inflation? Thank you. Yeah, okay. Absolutely. Maybe because it's hard for me now to do the math and remove the UK, but I can give you some ideas. I will not give you a specific number by country, but between Germany, France, and Italy, we see rate increases between 5 and 7. When we go to Australia for the six months, we had about 10. There was a question before coming, you know, you see partners at 11.6. This gives you an idea about the rate changes that we have in the countries. Spain, you can also we see 7% rate increases in Spain. You can see that broadly there is a nice momentum rate increases. I'm, I'm quoting here the retail business. You can see rate increases basically that are between 6 and 7 for a lot of European countries. We expect this, by the way, to not necessarily to go down. From that point of view, if we see that there is pressure coming from inflation, we are going to even accelerate more this rate increases. That's on the second question. The first question is when we are going to see growth in customer. You know, in an environment like this, where you have to increase price, and I'm sure everybody's doing that to a certain degree, it's kind of maybe challenging to see really customer growth, because anyway, it's a very, very, it's a environment where clearly conversation with the customer might be a little bit more complicated. This said, we have put a lot of effort on our branding. You know, we've been now for a few years, the brand number 1. We think this should eventually pay off. We put a lot of emphasis also on the bottom up voice of the customer. You have the Net Promoter Score, which is something we show you all the time. That's also a KPI that has been improving, but we also put a lot of effort on the voice of the customer. All this, which is improving, so all these kind of things eventually should translate in growth. My personal belief, also based on my experience as a CFO of a company a few years ago, you cannot really predict when growth is going to kick in, but you can put action in place that you can, you know, basically control what you can manage, and then eventually, in the right constellation, these actions and the right circumstances are going to create also growth in customer. There is not something that you can easily put in a presentation, like on a, in a, in a, you know, plan, like you can put an improvement of the combined ratio. I believe that we are taking all the actions that we need to take, and eventually, we should be able to get also to higher customer, customer growth. Thank you. Great results today. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks, Ashik. All right, this concludes our today's conference call. We say goodbye to everybody. We wish you a pleasant remaining afternoon and a relaxed summer break. Goodbye. Thank you, guys. Enjoy the summer break. Bye.