Manulife Financial Corporation has announced a net loss attributed to shareholders of $300m for the second quarter reflecting the challenging equity markets and interest rate environment. Despite the reported loss, MFC delivered strong growth in insurance sales, substantially reduced its risk profile and strengthened its underlying earnings. For the quarter, the fully diluted loss per common share was $0.18 and return on common shareholders’ equity was (5.8)%.
President and ceo Donald Guloien stated, “While volatile equity markets and lower interest rates took their toll, we made substantive progress against our strategic priorities, delivered excellent operating results and prudently managed our capital and financial position. We improved our product mix, increased pricing on a number of products, delivered robust insurance sales growth, achieved another all-time record in funds under management, generated strong new business embedded value and strengthened underlying earnings. Our variable annuity hedging programme was highly effective during the quarter and we significantly reduced our earnings sensitivity to interest rates.
On the other hand, we need to remind investors of the third quarter basis changes and that the impact of the continued macro-economic headwinds makes the achievement of our 2015 objectives more of a stretch.”
Cfo Steve Roder added “We are pleased with our record sales in a number of our Asian territories, many showing year over year double digit growth. We continued to execute on our strategy to diversify our distribution channels, with particularly strong results through the managing general agent channel in Japan and Bank Danamon in Indonesia. While the poor macro-economic environment put pressure on our wealth management sales in North America and on asset values, we reported another all-time record $514bn funds under management.”
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