Sampo (OTC:SAXPY) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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Access the full call at https://events.inderes.com/sampo/q2-2026-gylm9w0ouu/dial-in
Summary
Sampo Group reported strong first-half and second quarter results driven by broad-based top-line growth and cost efficiency improvements, with a 3% like-for-like growth in H1 and 5% in Q2.
Operating EPS increased by 12% in H1 and 6% in Q2 on a currency-adjusted basis, with a healthy rebound in investment returns in the second quarter.
The company upgraded its full-year outlook, expecting 7% to 9% insurance revenue growth and 4% to 9% underwriting result growth.
In the Nordic region, the Private segment saw 5% growth, supported by digital initiatives, while the UK business added 180,000 customers and achieved 7.6% top-line growth.
Nordic Commercial segment grew 8.6% in Q2, bolstered by SME portfolio growth and a significant personal insurance agreement in Denmark.
Management highlighted the successful expansion of digital tools like IfGPT and If Vet app, and maintained a strong solvency ratio of 174% despite market volatility.
The company noted some inflationary pressures, particularly in spare parts, and is implementing price increases in the UK motor market while maintaining strong margins.
Full Transcript
Mirko Hormerinta, Interim Head of Investor Relations
Good morning everyone and welcome to Sampo Group’s conference call on second quarter 2026 results. My name is Mirko Hormerinta, the interim head of IR at Sampo. I’m joined on the call today by Group CEO Morten Thorsrud and Group CFO Lars Kufalbeck. The call will include a short presentation by Morten and Lars, followed by Q&A. A recording of the call will later be available at sampo.com. With that, I hand over to you, Morten. Please go ahead.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Mirko, and good morning and a warm welcome to Sampo’s second quarter result conference call on my behalf as well. So Sampo delivered strong first half and second quarter results driven by broad-based and durable top line growth, disciplined underwriting and continued cost efficiency improvements across the group. Our first half like-for-like growth amounted to 3% and accelerated to 5% in the second quarter. This was supported by our private and SME lines in all markets, which I will cover in more detail shortly.
Combined with stable strong margins in a favorable claims environment, the top line growth translated into an underwriting result growth of 7% in the first half and 5% in the second quarter. On a currency-adjusted basis, the operating EPS increased by 12% in the first half and by 6% in the second quarter. Meanwhile, our investment returns saw a healthy rebound during the second quarter and our solvency coverage remains robust, of which Lars will elaborate on in a moment.
Following the strong first half performance, we have adjusted our full year outlook upwards both when it comes to insurance revenues as well as for the underwriting result. Now let’s take a closer look at our key segments with a focus on second quarter development. Our largest business area, Private in the Nordics, saw continued robust top line growth of 5% in the quarter. While the growth rate has slowed down a tad from previous quarters, it has become increasingly more volume-driven.
During the second quarter we saw an increase in customer count as well as in number of objects and object sales in all countries, while retention remained high and broadly stable. To me, this underlines the breadth and durability of our organic growth, which continues to be supported by our consistent efforts and initiatives to improve our digital customer journeys. To give a few examples of our digital initiatives, during the second quarter our If mobile app reached 1.8 million downloads across the Nordics, meaning nearly half of our household customers now use the mobile app to manage their policies and report claims.
In fact, during Q2 we reached our operational ambition of more than 70% of claims being reported digitally by the end of this year. We also expanded our AI-powered virtual agent IfGPT from Denmark into Sweden and Norway and at the same time we also launched an If Vet app in all Nordic countries which allows pet owners to contact vets 24/7 free of charge. Turning to the UK. In the UK the pricing environment has remained competitive and on the somewhat softer side.
However, we’ve seen further stabilization in pricing trends and we remain well positioned to accelerate our growth when the cycle now turns. Nevertheless, I’m pleased to see that even in this somewhat softer market environment we have continued to find carefully selected pockets of growth supported by our investments in data, pricing capabilities as well as in product innovation. In the second quarter we added around 180,000 customers, representing 13% growth year on year and 4% over the quarter.
This drove the like-for-like top line growth in our UK business to 7.6%, up from 1% in the first quarter. At the same time, we delivered strong margins within our target operating range, supported by continued operational efficiency. Moving to Nordic Commercial, which was our fastest growing segment in the second quarter with an 8.6% like-for-like growth, another proof of our diversified and durable organic growth. The growth was supported by improved traction in our SME portfolio, which saw accelerated growth of more than 5% in the quarter and a good increase in number of customers.
Further, the second quarter’s performance was propelled by several larger customer wins. One of these was a major personal insurance agreement in Denmark that provides access to comprehensive health care for 40,000 pensioners. This is an exciting expansion into a new segment and not only demonstrates our strong position in the personal insurance market, but also underlines the sustained structural demand for complementary healthcare beyond also the working age segment.
Given that there are over 1 million pensioners only in Denmark, we look forward to assessing this opportunity and open up this new market field. Now Lars will continue with some reflections on the investment performance and on our balance sheet.
Lars Kufalbeck, Group Chief Financial Officer
Thank you so much, Morten. It has been somewhat of a ride in the financial market in the first half of 2026, and following the very unsettled first quarter we saw, the second quarter saw a sharp rebound both in the equity and fixed income assets, and that of course also naturally reflected to our investment portfolio. On top of the continued stable interest and dividend income, our core portfolio saw net gains of 240 million euros, and that’s roughly evenly split between fixed income and equities in the quarter.
This was partly offset by a soft development in our two legacy assets, NOBA and Nexi. And just as a reminder, the market value of Nexi is reported with a one quarter delay, meaning the second quarter figures here reflect the asset’s actual performance in Q1. All in all, the total net investment income stood at 360 million euros, which more than offsets the mark-to-market driven net loss that we saw in Q4—sorry, Q1. If we turn to the solvency development in Q2, that remains strong and unchanged from the first quarter.
This was of course driven by a strong operating performance offsetting the slightly negative market effects, which ended up being smaller than we had initially anticipated. The main driver for the negative market effects was the symmetric adjustment, which increased to nearly 9% in the quarter, up from 5% last quarter, and hence it is now almost maxed out under the current solvency regime where it can maximum be 10%. This is an important figure to keep in mind when looking at our solvency.
With a zero symmetric adjustment, all else equal, our solvency ratio would have been 180%. So I’m naturally very happy with the 174% solvency with the symmetric adjustment being where it is at the moment. And also, just as a reminder, we deduct 90% of our operating result from our own funds each quarter, so the solvency coverage fully reflects our distribution commitments to our shareholders. So with that I leave it back to you, Morten.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Lars. As mentioned in the beginning, following the strong first half year performance, we have adjusted our full year outlook upwards. We now expect to achieve 7 to 9% insurance revenue growth and to deliver 4 to 9% underwriting result growth. The underwriting result range reflects the strong first half year performance and also includes what we know about July claims development, particularly regarding the big residential fire in Drammen in Norway.
Our preliminary claims estimate from this fire is around 15 million euros, primarily affecting our Private Nordic segment. To conclude, the second quarter represented another extension to our track record of delivering durable and broad-based organic growth at resilient and strong margins, in line with our promises to our shareholders. With that I leave it back to you, Mirko.
Mirko Hormerinta, Interim Head of Investor Relations
Thank you, Morten and Lars. Operator, we are now ready for questions.
OPERATOR
If you wish to ask a question, please dial on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial the pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Vash Casalia from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Vash Casalia, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I have two questions please. One is on UK Motor, so it feels like the messaging that’s coming out of Sampo is somewhat different from other players in the UK market who are already alluding to price increases, whereas you’re suggesting that the price is still stabilizing and relatively soft. So I was trying to sort of understand the comment there and what is it that you’re seeing in the market? If you could give us a little bit more color as to how do you expect the UK motor market to develop, that would be quite helpful.
The second one is on basically your commercial insurance segment, Nordic Commercial, wherein I just wanted to get a sense of one, your growth in second quarter is definitely very good, but it’s driven by these one-off large deals that you have. Can we sort of extrapolate that into 3Q–4Q or should we again expect a bit of a normalization going forward? That said, the other question or more broader question I have on the commercial insurance space is basically can you give us a little bit more color on the competitive landscape there?
And the reason I ask this is basically yourself and your Nordic peers seem to be stepping away from large commercial business in the Nordic region, but yet you talk about competitive intensity or pricing pressures and this is common across the board. So I’m quite curious, if everyone is stepping away from business, where does this competitive intensity come from? Thank you.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Good. I think I’ll try to answer to these questions first. UK motor market, the market situation and pricing is clearly improving, just to be clear on that. So you could sort of say that Q1 was definitely an improvement compared to Q4 and Q2 being an improvement compared to Q1. We still would like to see further price increases in the UK market, and we’re not sort of saying that the cycle has turned fully yet, but clearly improvement, and we are implementing price increases and also pricing for slightly higher inflation expectation and getting that through in the market.
So an improvement. But I think it’s a little bit too early to say that the cycle fully has turned, but we’re super happy about the development and again we’re able to write and grow our business focusing on the 88 to 90% operating ratio target. When it comes to Nordic Commercial, I think in a way you could say that the growth that we reported after Q1 was probably more of a normal situation than the growth that we report in Q2. So I see that we have strong growth momentum and I think you see that with more than 5% growth in the SME segment, good growth in number of customers.
So I think that we have good momentum also into the third quarter in the Nordic Commercial segment. Competitive landscape: first of all, we are not stepping away from the large corporate segment, we are sort of still committed to that. It’s a segment where we expect to make similar returns and similar profitability as we have in Private and Commercial in the Nordics. So we are still committed to that market. Then competition in the large corporate and upper commercial market is of course a little bit affected by the international reinsurance market, but of course the reinsurance market is a bit softening and part of that benefit is passed on to the large corporate customers. But apart from that, no new competition situation on sort of the more SME market side. So a stable competition there, I would say.
Vash Casalia, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
So can I just actually follow up on that one? So is it fair to then say, assuming, let’s say, the reinsurance market stabilizes from here on, you should then see probably slightly higher growth in the commercial segment because your headwinds are sort of gone?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
I think I would sort of distinguish between what we call commercial and what we call industrial large corporate. So what we call commercial is really sort of predominantly SME. And where the international reinsurance trends are not really that visible, it’s more similar to the private market. So the impact from the international reinsurance market and those trends are more visible in our industrial segment, so the large commercial segment. And again, I mean, it’s hard to say anything about the future, but again, there’s been, from our perspective, very favorable reinsurance terms.
That, of course, is a benefit that we partly can pass on to customers and in particular in the property area.
Daniel Wilson Omordia, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Got it, that’s very clear. Thank you so much.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Daniel Wilson, Omordia from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Daniel Wilson Omordia, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Hi. Morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I’ve got a couple here, mainly around, I guess, costs both on the Nordic side and the UK side. So your cost ratio in Q2 improved 10 to 20 bps this quarter. Just wondering what still gives you confidence in the 40 bps cost ratio improvement that you guide for in the year? So, yeah, what gives you confidence around that number? And secondly, in the private UK, the cost ratio has improved now quite strongly for the last two quarters.
Just wondering if you see this as sort of a trend that we can continue to expect. What’s driven this and more broadly? I guess, do you think that the expense efficiency around the UK can be better from here in a general sense? Just curious on your thoughts on that. Thank you very much.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
When it comes to the Nordic region and the Nordic cost ratio, we remain committed and strongly believe in the 40 basis points improvements, which is partially then fueled by synergies from the Topdanmark integration reaching 73 million now after Q2. And then, you know, quarterly development on cost is something that we don’t really focus that much on. Could be differences in when some expenses are being invoiced and stuff like that that, you know, affects the quarterly ratio.
So we more focus on the full-year development and, again, strongly committed to the 40 basis points improvements that we expect to see for the next few years in the Nordic cost ratio. When it comes to UK also, their sort of cost ratio can always be a little bit volatile from quarter to quarter, but it’s correct to assume that we have an efficiency potential that we are gradually taking out in our UK operation. So we have a positive outlook for sort of the development of the cost ratio there.
Over time, of course, we are growing and with scale comes, of course, potential efficiency improvements. And although we grow number of live customer policies with 13%, of course we’re not growing manning in the similar manner. So we do see sort of underlying efficiency improvements in the UK business.
Daniel Wilson Omordia, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Thank you.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Please go ahead.
Vinit Malhotra, Analyst at Mediobanca
Good morning. Thank you. So I have two questions rejecting raised here. One is Swedish new business, new car sales. Sorry, it seems that when we were tracking this data in July, we saw a much better print. I’m surprised it’s not been noted by you, but I’m curious if you have also seen it and you agree with that data and then so that could mean some kind of a slightly more positive effect or at least less drag from this line. Second question is, on the underlying 30 basis points, would you say that improvement by Y, would you say this is a little better than you would have expected?
Because I think you were indicating a little more conservatively or cautiously with the 1Q results. If anything interesting here, we very grateful. Thank you.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
I haven’t really seen the July new car sales figures in Sweden, if that is what you were pointing out. I think the Q2 new car sales was just slightly positive. So limited development really in the Swedish market in that respect. So the story still is that when new car sales will pick up in Sweden, it should support us on growth and it’s still a little bit of a headwind to us. So when we report around 5% growth on private, it would be 6% when excluding the Swedish mobility.
Then when it comes to the 30 bps underlying improvement, I think we’ve been sort of improving risk ratio with around 20 to 30 basis points for quite a while now. And I think we were starting to say that there is, of course, a limit to how long this will last, otherwise the combined ratio will be extremely low. So, yeah, perhaps slightly better than expected, but not a big change yet.
Vinit Malhotra, Analyst at Mediobanca
Thank you very much.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Nadia Claressa, from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Nadia Claressa, Analyst at JP Morgan
Hi, good morning, both. I have two questions, please. The first is just on private UK. I think the message that, you know, underwriting margins remain in line with your target level is clear, but could you perhaps elaborate on this and, you know, is this driven more by the cost efficiencies as you discussed previously, Morten? The reason I’m asking is, you know, because if we look at the loss ratio standalone, you know, it has increased 3, 3.8 points at H1, so just keen to understand where the new business written now sits.
And second, going back to commercial, in particular SMEs, I think growth has improved there, as mentioned, quarter on quarter, but it is still below the 6% ambition as of H1. So should we be expecting a pickup closer to this target rate over the next few quarters or, based on your—do you think that the market dynamics are just too competitive and therefore it’s not really supportive of this ambition at the moment? Thank you.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks. I think when it comes to the UK, you know, it’s all about pricing and price sophistication. So the support that we get on the cost ratio side is helpful, but it’s much more important efforts that we put into, you know, improving on the data side, improving our pricing models, and we’ve done quite some investment in this area also in this year, perhaps in particular on the data side. And with that, of course, we find new segments where we then expect to reach 88 to 90% operating ratio.
So I think it’s more that sort of that is driving again, price sophistication. And then, of course, a slightly more positive market, slight increases in premium levels, of course, is starting to help as well. When it comes to commercial and SME. I think, yeah, 5% is not too far from 6. We’ve been sort of up and around sort of the 6% figure sort of for a few quarters. I think first quarter, as I mentioned, was a little bit special in that respect and I think we see a little bit of more normalization now in the second quarter and we believe that we have a very strong position in the SME market.
That market is becoming more digital and customer behavior is starting, of course, to mimic the behavior that we see in the private market. So gradually we expect to see that all of the investments we made in digitalization start to pay off also in the SME market.
Lars Kufalbeck, Group Chief Financial Officer
And I think last year, I think on the part, UK private, just to make sure, I mean the worsening in the loss ratio that we have seen in Q2 is exactly as expected because it’s just a natural consequence of the lower rate levels that we saw from Q2 onwards last year now fully earning through in the book. So that’s what’s driving that.
The deterioration combined with seasonal, of course, package.
Nadia Claressa, Analyst at JP Morgan
Great, thank you.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Emil Immanin from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Emil Immanin, Analyst at DNB Carnegie
Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. I was a little bit surprised maybe by the mention of ETHGPT in the report. So maybe you could help me understand what is the tool really used for? What is the goal of using that tool? Do you have any metrics supporting efficiency improvements or something along those lines?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
It’s a customer service tool where, again, the customers can ask any question about their insurance matters, coverages and so forth. It gives really tailor-made answers. And of course then this is part of our service setup, in particular in the private segment. It’s too early, of course, to see real benefits. Even though we see very high usage of it, it’s still too early to see that this is reducing number of calls to the customer center. But that’s, of course, the logic that with more of these tools we should be able to reduce the number of calls to the customer centers and continue to improve efficiency on the customer service side.
Emil Immanin, Analyst at DNB Carnegie
Can you say any early metrics? Is this liked by customers? What is the reception overall?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
It’s been really appreciated by customers. This was initially developed and launched in Topdanmark and then we have sort of exported it to other countries and it was a big success when it was launched and therefore we were very confident that this was something that we should also launch in the rest of our portfolio. So good response from the customers on this.
Emil Immanin, Analyst at DNB Carnegie
Okay, thank you. That’s clear.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Carl Lofthagen from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Carl Lofthagen, Analyst at Berenberg
Hi, thank you for taking my question. I just had a follow-up on UK Motor. I’m just wondering what is the quantum of rate increases that you are putting through right now? I know some of your peers have highlighted kind of mid to high single digits. Is that what you’re doing as well? And then just on claims inflation where you’re kind of highlighting a little bit of increased inflationary pressure. Just wondering where is that coming from? Thank you.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
We typically don’t sort of disclose too much about sort of our exact price increases. And it varies obviously, so a little bit from segment to segment to product to product. But of course we operate in the same market as competitors and you could expect us to see, of course, broadly the same market trends that competitors allude to. And then your second question on claims inflation, what we sort of are a little bit sort of focused on is, of course, inflation related to spare parts, inflation related to also sort of other claims types, but in particular spare parts as a result of the ongoing situation still with the Strait of Hormuz.
So we have added on a little bit extra pricing to cater for slightly higher inflation in the UK. We also set aside a little bit stronger reserves to cater for higher inflation both in the UK and the Nordics. Actually it’s not a big change, but I think in this environment it’s prudent, I think, to focus a little bit more on inflation and expect to see some effects in the sort of short/medium term.
Carl Lofthagen, Analyst at Berenberg
Okay, great, thank you.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Nimrat Kaur from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Nimrat Kaur, Analyst at Bank of America
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I was wondering if you can give us any information on how the ceding commission on the quota share has moved in private UK at the most recent renewals and then on the new deal in Nordics commercial. Anything you can give us on the margins or the returns where it is priced.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Will you take quota share?
Lars Kufalbeck, Group Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, on CUK there it’s flattish. So there are no significant movements on that that has any meaningful impact on our numbers.
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
And the new deal in Nordic commercial. Are you alluding to the new health insurance?
Nimrat Kaur, Analyst at Bank of America
Yeah, with the 40,000 pensioners?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, that’s underwritten with the same sort of profitability targets that we have for the rest of the business.
Nimrat Kaur, Analyst at Bank of America
Okay, thank you.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from Jaako Tyrwainen from SEB. Please go ahead.
Jaako Tyrwainen, Analyst at SEB
Yes, good morning and thanks for having my questions. A good follow up on the UK situation and the accelerated growth over there. What’s the growth basically or virtually coming only from those mentioned selected segments or growth pockets that you have been identified or did you catch any further or new growth coming from the, let’s say, more widely and overall from the markets?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I mean we have been growing quite steadily in the UK, as you know, for quite a long time, and it’s quite broad-based growth in motor. The growth is mainly coming from motor, so a little bit less in home, and again it’s quite broad-based in the different sort of product solutions that we have in the UK market. So nothing really special there. But again supported by all of the investments that we do in data and data analytics and pricing, pricing sophistication.
Michael, Analyst
Okay, thanks. And then on the rather uncertain or volatile inflation outlook, are you seeing the market participants overall being enough cautious with the current outlook for 27 inflation pressure? Meaning that are they putting enough price hikes to offset the upcoming inflation?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
I don’t think we should answer too much on behalf of competitors. We focus on pricing for inflation that we expect to see, and we see that we get those price increases through in the market, and that perhaps indicates that all the competitors are having a somewhat similar outlook. But I think again we rather focus on what we are doing than speculating too much about competitors’ pricing.
Michael, Analyst
Understand? Then finally, could you provide a kind of update on the Danish court ruling earlier in the spring? Do you still consider the reserves sufficient? Has there been any kind of new info around this case?
Morten Thorsrud, Group Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I’ll leave that to Lars.
Lars Kufalbeck, Group Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, no, no, thanks for the question. I think when it comes to the ruling from the Supreme Court, we still believe that the past is the past, so to speak. And as we announced in our Q1 release, the impact on old claims is expected to be covered by our events not in data reserve. So no changes to that. And I think as a side note, of course we are monitoring and following this up extremely closely. And when we spoke to our claims colleagues earlier this week, we have so far registered around 10 cases — 10 cases — where the claimants have asked to have their case reopened in our portfolio and systems.
When it comes to the current year, as we earn the premiums through, we of course reserve to the new and expected elevated claims level, and the impact from that is fully included in our outlook for the year. And then final comment. I think when it comes to future pricing, we have finalized our analysis and we have a clear view of the pricing actions that we need to take. However, it’s important to remember that the majority of our workers’ compensation book in Denmark renews on January 1st. I hope that answers and gives an update on the Danish workers’ comp case, broadly.
Michael, Analyst
Very good. Thanks for the update. That’s all from Michael.
OPERATOR
There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Mirko Hormerinta, Interim Head of Investor Relations
All right, thank you very much. That concludes the call today. Thank you for listening in.
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