Hello, everyone. Thank you for virtually attending this press conference where we present the half-year results for 2026 of the AXA Group. Thomas Buberl, CEO for the Group, will be presenting the main highlights and takeaways of this half-year. Guillaume Borie, who is in charge of finance, risk underwriting, and technology in Group, and Alban de Mailly Nesle, CFO, will be presenting in detail our businesses and our main key indicators following this presentation. Obviously, Thomas Buberl, Guillaume Borie, and Alban de Mailly Nesle, as well as other members of the management board, will be available to answer your questions. I now turn it over to Thomas Buberl, CEO for the AXA Group.
Thank you, Ziad, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the press conference on the AXA Group's 2026 half-year results.
First and foremost, I would like to express my solidarity with the victims of the wildfires, more specifically in the two countries that are key to the group, France and Spain, and of course, with the firefighters and all those who are involved in fighting the fires. In response to the devastating fires that have ravaged the Var, Gironde, and Landes regions, we have activated our climate risk crisis response plan, ClimAgir, which enables us to assist our affected policyholders, particularly by providing emergency housing and helping them meet their immediate needs. I will have the opportunity to return to this topic in a few moments. To begin, I will present the key takeaways I have drawn from the first half of the year.
I will turn the floor to Guillaume Borie, the Group's Chief Financial Strategy, Underwriting Risk, and Technology Officer, and to Alban de Mailly Nesle, Chief Financial Officer, who will present our business and our key financial indicators in detail. We will, of course, be available after that to answer your questions. AXA delivered a remarkable performance in the first half of the year. You can see that our premiums reached EUR 66.3 billion, which represents a 5% increase compared to the first half of 2025. This demonstrates the strength of our business model momentum, the quality of our offerings, and above all, the effectiveness of our strategy based on organic growth. This growth is profitable. Our underlying earnings are rising by 9%, excluding AXA IM, to EUR 4.5 billion. Underlying Earnings Per Share increased by 8% at the high end of our target range.
Our balance sheet is very strong, with a Solvency II ratio that remains at a high level of 218%, which is up by three percentage points versus January 1st, 2026. I would like to thank our employees and agents to whom we owe this excellent performance, as well as our customers for their great loyalty. I will now present the specifics of this performance by business line. All our business lines are contributing to a very strong performance, whether in terms of premiums or underlying earnings. Our engines are running at full speed. This performance once again demonstrates the sound diversification of business model, which helps us navigate sometimes volatile market environments, the quality of our operations, and the execution of our priorities across all business lines and customer segments, and our efficiency gains, particularly through our technology and artificial intelligence initiatives.
Alban will go into more details about these figures. The AXA share is outperforming the major indices such as the CAC 40 or the STOXX Insurance Index. This positive trend is the outcome of AXA's financial and extra-financial performance. It also demonstrates our ability to implement a strategy that is perfectly suited to our business environment. Over the past decade, we have transformed the Group by strengthening its key strength. We have reduced AXA's exposure to financial risks, such as the current volatility in interest rates right now. The consistency of our earnings, the predictability of our performance, and our resilience to instability have become our hallmark. This is what enables us to continue supporting our customers every day despite a challenging risk environment. This is what enables us to provide solutions for new protection needs and to serve new categories of policyholders.
I also wanted to take this opportunity of our presentation to reiterate our commitments to our policyholders in the face of the devastating wildfires, and more broadly, in support of the climate transition, whether dealing with wildfires, severe flooding, or the hailstorms that struck France earlier this year, we stand by our policyholders to face an increasing number of climate-related events. More specifically in France, we paid out 5.6% of our premiums to cover natural disaster claims, compared to 3.5% at the Group level. This clearly demonstrates the extent to which France is currently bearing the brunt of climate change. In response, we have made several types of commitments. One commitment of being present when there are crisis situations.
This requires, for example, in France, through our ClimAgir initiative, which we activate for every major climate event, as well as the support we provide to the Red Cross or firefighters through the AXA Found for Human Progress. We also invest in prevention, which will play an increasingly vital role in ensuring insurability and managing the risk cost. Prevention is an essential investment we must make collectively, not only to reduce the impact of climate risks, but also in the areas of health and cybersecurity, for instance. I would like to highlight here two recent prevention initiatives designed to benefit our policyholders. The first one is a hailed prevention scheme that reimburses auto policies of up to EUR 50 for parking costs for motor-related events during severe hailstorms following a receipt of an SMS alert. Secondly, a free health prevention checkup offered to policyholders covered by our Group insurance plans.
Finally, we remain steadfast in our commitment to reducing carbon emissions across our insurance and investment portfolios. I refer you to the examples shown on this slide, which demonstrate the progress that we have made. This slide outlines the key financial objectives of the Unlock the Future plan. For the first half of the year, the key takeaways are AXA has delivered remarkable performance during this first half, building on the momentum of our 2025 year. We have achieved excellent performance across all our business lines. Our profitability remains stable and solid, and lastly, we are confident in our ability to deliver growth in 2026 in the Underlying Earnings Per Share growth at the upper end of our target range. I will now turn it over to Guillaume Borie.
Thank you very much, Thomas. Hello, everyone, and thank you for being here today. I will now be reviewing some key facts and numbers about AXA's operating performance in this first half. First and foremost, by reviewing performance levels across all of our markets. All our business lines, as Thomas said, are showing growth, which is reflected across all markets and all of our operations globally. I want to emphasize the fact that such performance has been outstanding across all of our geographies, with positive contributions by each and every one of our countries. At AXA Group today, all of our countries, all of our geographies have been positively contributing to the underlying earnings of the group.
The outstanding performance by AXA XL is to be underlined, which underlying earnings reached EUR 1 billion in this first half, growing 4% in a more challenging market, which demonstrates the quality of AXA XL's teams and how committed and dedicated they are to serve their clients, to continue to grow and expand the business operations, and deliver stellar profitability. AXA XL, next to AXA France, confirms that this is a second engine for growth for the AXA Group. You can also see a similar outstanding performance level by our European market through seven countries, with underlying earnings up 12%, with revenues up 6%. Finally, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have also registered robust profitability in excess of EUR 900 million, with growth up 7% in the first half. What these great results show across geographies is the operating robustness of the group.
With our ability to keep growing and expanding our underlying earnings year in, year out across each and every country on the back of the commitments and dedication of our teams, of our distribution channels, and we appreciate and thank them for this, as well as the continual investment of the group in the quality of the teams, in the staffing and recruitment with the best talent in our expertise areas, and in the quality of our technology assets. This operating performance is not incidental. It reflects three key fundamentals: our execution discipline, our orientation towards growth and conquest, and innovation spirit. With respect to execution discipline, you know that right from the beginning of the strategic plan, Unlock the Future, we have improved across the board on the operational level across all of our operations.
This is very well summarized in this page, with revenues growing with CAGR of 7% growth from the beginning of the plan, while continually improving the profitability levels of each of our operations. This is true in the property insurance, where our combined ratios has improved by 1.6 point from the beginning of the plan. It is true in life and health, where the combined ratio has been improving by 3.1 points from the beginning of the plan, with the margin levels growing in health and life insurance, so showing increased technical profitability of our operations. This is fundamental as it reflects the outstanding excellence levels of our teams and our capacity to offer the best possible products and services. We've kept working on our Administrative Expense Ratio, and you can see that the Administrative Expense Ratio has been reduced by 40 basis points from the beginning of the plan.
All this has been reflecting the fact that we are well-positioned to achieve the targets and objectives of the strategic plan, as Thomas Buberl just said a minute ago, which also reflects the strengthening of the competitiveness of the group across all of its markets. I want to emphasize this point, because competitiveness is the engine for our growth. Thanks to our competitiveness across the world, we can win new business, new clients, better serving and supporting these clients in the face of the multiplicity of risk. Our profitability and our competitiveness are authentically there to serve and support our clients and to support our capacity to be there alongside them over the longer time.
The trust and confidence of our clients has showed up in the first half as we gained an additional 2 million clients, which is more than what we accomplished across all of fiscal 2025, which shows the extent to which our winning strategy has been delivering results, knowing that we are pushing the acceleration of the strategy, which is reflected by our higher performance levels. We do that through several levers. We want to keep investing on the quality of the customer experience, especially through artificial intelligence, by offering simplified customer journeys, by providing better explanation, communication on the risk they are confronted with, and the insurance coverage they should take out. Our winning spirit is based on the quality of our distribution channels.
First and foremost being our tied agents, as well as all exclusive distribution networks for AXA, which is especially active to serve and support our clients and improve their satisfaction levels on the back of their talents and expertise. I would also say that AXA Group has been a leader in direct insurance business. We are the first direct insurer in continental Europe, and we shored up our positions last year by acquiring Prima in Italy, the earnings of which in the first half are excellent, which adds up to a network which was already very robust on the back of a long-term strategy by the group with our Direct Assurance leader in France, which has a leadership position and which registered outstanding stellar performance in the first half of fiscal 2026.
Our winning strategy builds upon significant efforts, which we deliver all out to cover all of our customer segments. In this respect, for the last few years at AXA, we've conducted an AXA EssentiALL initiative to better support and serve the lowest income households across the world. This inclusive insurance initiative enables us today to cover more than 20 million clients, and this share of 20 million clients was expected by the end of 2026. In fact, as early as June of 2026, we've exceeded this mark, which is a business we operate in 20 countries of the group. To deploy it, we use distribution models which are trusted by and which are well-known by our policyholders.
I will go through a few initiatives which reflects our winning objective. I want to, before that, to emphasize the fact that today, everywhere across the world and across our markets, all our business operations have an NPS, a Net Promoter Score for our clients, which is higher or equal to that of the market. You can see how it translates the great efforts we do to best serve and support our clients. The last point is about our innovation strategy and the way we are placing innovation at the service of our expertise, because our expertise, we believe, is the key factor for thriving in a fast-changing world. In a few words, AI today is no longer a trial-and-error solution at AXA. It's been an operating reality that we've been upscaling across the Group. Why do we do that?
To improve customer service, to facilitate the work by our teams, to achieve more efficiencies at the Group level. As you know, we've recently announced that we will be deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot solutions across all of our employees, so that we make their lives and their job easier, making them more effective, more efficient, making sure that the number of tasks are done quicker and better, so that we free up time for higher added-value activities to best serve our clients. We've also accelerated the deployment of agentic AI solutions in a very secure context, of course, and this is of great importance in our AI strategic plan with a few examples that I will review. In the U.K., we have deployed a new tool to better manage the underwriting and claims management, which enables our claims managers to come up with a reimbursement offer quicker and better.
In Italy, we have developed a solution called Preventia, which is a mobile AI application which enables our tied agents to conduct risk-related inspections directly through AI tools with their clients. I'm emphasizing this example because it directly translates the efforts we are conducting in the field of prevention, which Thomas mentioned earlier. Thanks to such technology, we promote preventing risks much faster and much better. Anticipating and preventing risk will provide better safety, better security for our policyholders, enabling them to better understand their surrounding environment. Finally, in Switzerland, we are mainstreaming chatbots to improve customer experience with chatbots, enabling our clients to explore all of our products and services through an app which is directly incorporated into the ChatGPT solutions, providing faster, clearer answers available at all times, while leaving our teams to manage the most complex cases. I will conclude by saying one thing.
Innovation at AXA Group in the way we use AI has been done in the context of a clear strategy to combine speed and the power of AI, building up on our expertise. The combination of the two will enable us not to replace human beings, but much to the contrary, to place the human beings at the center of what matters most, to better serve and support our clients in the face of a more complex world. This is what I wanted to tell you about our operating performance at AXA Group and the way we try and transform everything. Of course, we'll repeat this when we launch our strategic plan. I'm turning over to our CFO, Alban de Mailly Nesle , for the financial performance.
Thank you, Guillaume. Hello, everyone. I will now dive deep into how this beautiful underlying earnings translated into our figures. Let me start with P&C. What you can see on this slide is a beautiful growth in our revenues in P&C insurance. Let me start with the retail one, which is up by 8%, which shows what Guillaume said, the fact that we conquered two million new net contracts in the first half, plus more than the same period last year. In commercial alliance, we continue to grow in Europe as well as in France, especially in France with a 6% rise of our revenues. On the other hand, in XL, with the market conditions slightly more tense, we focused on our margins. The revenue is slightly down by 1% for the insurance part.
Reinsurance, where the context is even more complicated, we reduced our revenue by 9% to once again focus on our margins. The underlying earnings in P&C grew by 6%, which reflects that rising revenues, and it also reflects that our financial results have improved, and we have maintained our margins, as we can see on the next page. The combined ratio for the group is at an excellent level of 90.1%, nearly identical to what we had last year at the same period. It was at 90% then. It translates not only the focus we had on our margins, but also all the initiatives that we are adopting, whether how we manage claims or regarding prevention. In order to manage the cost of our claims with a very good figure, I'd like to insist on two elements. We continued to reinforce the caution in our reserves.
That combined ratio allows us to do so. Let me also insist on the expenses of NatCat , which is at 3.5% of our premiums for the group as a whole. This is why it's interesting to have our highly diversified model, which enables us both to face NatCat that we are seeing in France and in Southern Europe, and which are offset because in other countries, we don't see NatCat at the same time. The expense of NatCat remains steady on the whole compared to last year. Let me review the health and life insurance. This is our second leg, where we see very strong growth in that business with a 9% growth of our premiums in the life business, especially in unit-linked accounts, but also the fund in euros at 11% or protection at 6%.
In the health area, sharp growth, whether in the retail insurance or the collective ones, respectively 8% and 5%. What matters a lot for us as well is the net inflows, which stands at EUR 4.7 billion, up compared to last year, where it was only at EUR 3.6 billion. That net new cash is the way we pile up reserves and assets that will help us in the coming years to release higher results. It's important for us, therefore, to grow that net inflows. It shows also that our premiums are increasing, but our customers are staying, which obviously is a good signal that is sent to us. Looking at the results of the life and health insurance, they are sharply higher by 11%, as you can see, especially driven by the technical results. There again, let me insist on the following.
The rise of the technical effects, or that is lower of a combined ratio in protection and health, are driven by how we manage our claims. In particular, the way we do it enables us to have a more adequate response to our policyholders, who are also patients, so that we can manage our own network of clinics or hospitals, or call upon third parties on this topic. There again, it reflects the prevention actions we adopt in terms of health for our customers. The release of margin on the contractual service has increased. By the way, the barbarian world means that it is the outcome that we have on our savings business. Thanks to net new cash and to the higher markets, which increase our unit-linked accounts, we can increase our profits in that particular business, which is the savings one.
On the whole, the growth rate is high when it comes to our life and health business. Moving on now to the recap of our earnings and results, the 6% rise of our P&C, 11% health and life insurance, and we have no longer any results on the asset management since we sold AXA IM to BNP Paribas on the first last year. The results of deholding are quite steady, so that our underlying earnings are growing by 3%, but actually by 9%, excluding AXA IM. You can see also 9% rise of our net income. This is an excellent performance, therefore. Looking at our earnings per share, it is increasing by 8%.
That is 4% due to the higher underlying earnings on the one hand, and what we call equity management plus 6% is the fact that we bought back our shares to compensate the AXA IM loss of earnings. Our 3%, our FX effect, especially on the dollar and on the yen, on the average level compared to the previous half year. 8% of earnings per share is at the top end of our target range of 6%-8% that we had regarding that particular plan. Lastly, regarding the robustness of our balance sheet, our solvency ratio stands at 218%. It was at 224% at the end of December last year. As you know, on the 1st of January was expiring the grandfathering of our Solvency II debt, so mechanically we lost 10 points.
Compared to 215% resulting, we gained 3% of solvency, especially thanks to what we call the generation of normalized capital. That is, how much equity of solvency are we creating half year after half year? Now we are plus 17 points, which is a record, which shows a very sound growth, generating solvency, which doesn't require a lot of additional equity. I will stop at this stage and give it back to Thomas for the conclusion.
Thank you, Alban. By way of conclusion, we can say that this first half of fiscal 2026 confirms the very positive momentum we had in 2025. Our profitability has been very robust, with underlying earnings up 9%. This performance level can be seen across all of our markets and across all of our business lines. All of our engines are running on all four cylinders, thanks to underlying and operating performance and profitability, which has continually increased over the plan. We've gained 2 million of net contract in property insurance business, which reflects our sound competitiveness in the market. As a summary, this half year is a half year of winning, conquering profitability, trust, and confidence. We are well-positioned to achieve our goal of underlying earnings per share in the higher end of our bracket.
All this positions us in a very robust way to launch our next strategic plan, which will be done on the 15th of September. Thank you for your attention. We will gladly take your questions.
Let's have now your questions and answers, with the first question from the internet.
From Paolo Algisi from Ansa. A major wave of consolidation is currently underway in the Italian financial sector, which could potentially affect Generali's shareholding structure. Against this backdrop, there have been press reports regarding possible interest from AXA, particularly given that Banca MPS, its largest shareholder, might divest its stake. I would like to ask if you could comment on these reports or rule out any interest from AXA in Generali should MPS decide to sell its shares. Thank you.
Thank you, Paolo, for this question. Indeed, there is a lot of things happening in Italy around our banking partner, Monte dei Paschi. We are currently focusing very much on continuing to make our joint venture with MPS work well. As we said along the whole presentation, our focus is very much around operational performance, organic development, and not looking at buying any stakes in any of our competitors. Thank you.
We go, [Non-English content ]. Next question please.
The first question is by Jean-Luc Champetier from Investir. Jean-Luc, you have the floor.
Yes. Thank you. On MPS in Italy, can you recall what this joint venture partnership is about? Give us some numbers. Give us the due date as there is a risk of MPS leaving the scheme and being replaced by another insurance company. Another more technical question, the combined ratio. I would like to have some details about the development of the claims paid out or provided for, the management expenses, and the marketing and sales expenses as a percentage of the prorated business by the first half. I have not seen any detailed information on this combined ratio. You said that you have cautiously increased your reserves in the property insurance business. Can you give us an order of magnitude, what it accounts for? Thank you.
Thank you, Jean-Luc, for your three questions. This is Thomas Buberl. I suggest I will answer the first on the partnership agreement with MPS, and Alban de Mailly Nesle will answer the other two on the cautious reserving and the combined ratio. On our joint venture partnership agreement, this has been longstanding with MPS, knowing that our partnership has experienced different chapters and phases. Remember that MPS was not always in an easy situation in the past. This partnership will run until October 2027, and I believe that what will happen will depend on what happens with MPS and how our partnership develops. It is much too early today to study this because, as Paolo's question showed, there are lots of options, lots of moves, lots of M&A activities in the banking industry in Italy.
I think that we need to let the dust settle a bit before we look at our options with regards to our partnership. Remember, Jean-Luc, that our joint venture with MPS in Italy is of great importance for AXA Group. Having said that, in the last few years, we have made two major acquisitions in Italy. One was to acquire Nobis, the other one was to acquire Prima, which has been consolidated this year in the first half 2026. These two major acquisitions have been running very well and have made it possible to stabilize and grow our footprint in Italy. Of course, we would like to continue our partnership with MPS beyond October 2027.
Even if this partnership is terminated, we got prepared to make sure our business footprint in Italy, which is a very important market for us, will be sufficiently large for us to be prepared for any options, including the option whereby this partnership would be terminated. Alban, can you answer the other two questions?
Yes. Good morning, Jean-Luc. With respect to your question, the combined ratio, so much for the detail. When you look at the major geographies, let us start with AXA XL. The loss ratio of AXA XL increased by 1.2 points, which entirely originates in the cost of claims in the Gulf region. You may have noted in our press release that we quantify this impact to some EUR 100 million.
Not including this one-off cost, the loss ratio for XL would be steady and stable, which is very fine performance in the challenging pricing environment for AXA XL. Turning to commercial insurance, not including AXA XL, the loss ratio improved by 0.5 points, a very fine performance, which reflects the quality of our underwriting operations. The same goes for the retail insurance, where our loss ratio improved by 0.2 points. Looking now at expenses and costs in property insurance business, our role on the costs improved by 0.4% due to a positive geo effect between the very fine growth we registered and the fact that obviously we've been disciplined in the way we've managed our expenses.
Conversely, the commission and fees ratio increased by 0.4 percentage points, offsetting the savings and efficiency we've done on our own costs, and this barely reflects the business mix that we've been operating in the first half. My last comment will be on the combined ratios in the health business and protection business, improving by 0.5 and 0.2 percentage points respectively. In the health insurance business, we've been registering very fine performance levels in the U.K. and in Ireland. Remember that just two or three years ago, this business operations had its combined ratio increase. We worked very hard to improve the quality of underwriting and of claims management, which enables us to show a very fine combined ratio in the U.K., and generally speaking, the improved combined ratio in the health business originated in all of our countries.
Your last question was about how cautious we've been in our reserving policy. We are not quantifying this degree of caution. What I want to emphasize is that we've released one percentage point of prior year development, which is a historically low level. It happened in the past that we released up to two or three percentage points of prior year development. The fact that we only released one percentage point means that we're keeping a great degree of caution on our side.
Thank you, Alban. Turning to the next question.
The next question, Thierry Gouby from News Assurances Pro. Thierry, thank you for activating your mic. Over to you.
Can you hear me?
Yes, perfectly.
Thank you for your presentation. Two questions. The first one regarding AXA XL. Beyond the loss ratio, anything that accounts for the slight drop in the decline in insurance and reinsurance? Guillaume, about reinsurance, spoke about extraordinary performance. Can you deep dive into this? Does it come from your clients, et cetera? Thank you.
Thank you, Thierry, for your two questions. I suggest that the first question about AXA XL be dealt with by Guillaume Borie. The second question on direct insurance with Mathieu Godart here, who is CEO of AXA France. He will answer about that one. Guillaume.
Thank you very much. Hello, Thierry. About AXA XL. The revenue is down slightly by 2%. This is a result of a drop in the insurance business by 1%, and there's a decline of 9% for the reinsurance. On the reinsurance side, it's quite aligned with the overall market situation. It's even better than most of what we see in the market. Above all, it's done under very good profitability conditions, because just on the insurance business, our results are sharply higher by 6%. We consider, therefore, that this business exactly positioned where it ought to be. About the insurance business, it's the current cycle that accounts for it overall, globally. For a large gap, insurance is a sharp slowdown, and when you look at this, for us, it translates the proactive management of the cycle, and we're happy with it.
The price effect is down by 1% and volumes are stable. In other words, for XL, there's a very active management of the cycle to look for growth where we can find it under good profitability conditions to continue maintain our volumes in the lines where we have a strong profitability, even though prices are going down. This is particularly down in the property business, where we still have an excellent combined ratio. Even with lower prices, we underwrite still under good conditions. In order not to look for volume growth in the business lines where we can see too sharp a decline in the premiums, which no longer covers the cost of premiums. Bear in mind, this management of the cycle will be continued by us in the next few half years and months, and we operate in 26 countries with 400 products.
The challenge is that for each of our policyholders, we have to take the right decisions day in and day out to balance out the portfolio. On the whole, we see sharply slower for the big risks, the great risk in the world, when we still have fairly stable revenues overall, and a combined ratio which, beyond the losses in the Middle East, is stable, and the underlyings, which is slightly up by 4%. We consider that AXA XL is very well-positioned in the current cycle, and the teams are doing an excellent job.
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Thierry, for this question regarding direct insurance. Yes, direct insurance a chieves an exceptional performance year after year with a pace in this half equaling 20% of development in revenue with the conquest of new customers, which is spectacular. About 150,000 new contracts in the motor business and over 70,000 new management recorded in MRH.
All of this combined with the price sophistication, which is continuing to grow and is a possibility for the group to move up in scale. Also, we strictly manage our claims so that we can strike the right balance in regard to growth and profitability. With regard to our momentum, the diversification pathway, especially with the conquest from now on in individual health, but also the borrower's insurance. A very beautiful performance of direct insurance, which confirms its undisputed leadership in France in this particular direct market.
Thank you, Mathieu. The next question.
The next question is raised by Ingrid Feuerstein from Les Echos. Ingrid, thank you for activating your mic. Over to you.
Hello, everyone. I have a question about how you manage costs. You are saying that one of the three levers to achieve your financial goals is to optimize the management of your costs. I would like to know if there are new cost reduction plans underway, especially with the AI deployment you talked about, the impact. We see some financial establishments which can say what will be the impact on the headcount overall, and what place all of this will hold in your next strategic plan announced in September. Thank you for that.
Thank you, Ingrid, for your question.
I will yield to Guillaume Borie. One thing that you should bear in mind, well, today, of course, we are not on the 15th of September, so in several weeks' time, we will be showing you exactly our plan. AI will play a major role in that. When we think about AI in the insurance business, it is important to think broadly. Well, yes, there is one question about the automation aspect and on improving customer service, which certainly has effects on cost. However, remember that AI will also, and is already helping us greatly in the increase of our margins and in regard to the increase of our growth. It is important, in my view, with regard to AI, to strike the right balance between these three factors. Guillaume, on the cost management aspect.
Thank you very much. For all of us across the world, managing our costs and expenses is daily hygiene. Day in, day out, we make sure that we manage mainstream industrial strength processes. Most of our expenses are connected with sales and marketing expenses for marketing our products and services and for managing the process. These are mass industrial strength processes whereby all our teams work hard to streamline, to optimize, to accelerate our processes, and we have lots of tools and systems available to us, including these new generation technology tool. This practice has been at AXA Group for a number of years through all of our business units, and this productivity has been serving and fueling our ability to tap into growth without necessarily recruiting externally or increasing our costs. This is translated in the 40 basis points drop of our Administrative Expense Ratio.
The second instrument we have to optimally manage our cost is our purchasing and procurement discipline. Day in, day out, we buy lots of services across the world, and every year, we are more disciplined in our procurement policies. In the last few months, we have even accelerated and increased our efforts in this respect. These are very tangible operating levers, which enables us to be more efficient, tap into more growth, and better control our costs.
Thank you very much, Guillaume. Moving on to the next question.
To insurer. In your comment to AXA XL Primary Commercial, you cite higher volumes in property and lower volumes in casualty. What exactly is being cut in casualty and where? Overall, AXA XL pricing was down 1%. Can you split rate movement between property, casualty, financial lines, and specialty, and say which classes are now below loss trend? Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn, for your question. I suggest Alban will respond to this question.
Thank you, Glenn. As Guillaume said earlier, we are growing in property. There is no specific class in casualty where we absolutely want to reduce our exposure because it is a profitable business. It is business by business, policy by policy that the underwriter makes a decision. When we look at the various lines of business, on your question on the prices. On property overall, prices are down by 7%. That does not take into account the fact that simply with inflation, it is compensated to the tune of 2%-3% by the increase in the policy value. Prices as such are down by 7%, which obviously is below loss trend because it is below inflation and notably construction inflation. Casualty prices are up 4%-5%. It is good.
It is slightly below loss trend, which depending on the line, is between 6% and 8%. On financial lines, prices are down 2%-2.5%. I think interestingly on that line of business, you know that prices have been down for the last two to three years probably, and we believe we see that bottoming out, notably in the last month of the semester. We think that we could see price increases in financial lines going forward. Finally, in specialty, prices are stable to slightly negative. Overall, when you see that, and as Guillaume mentioned, we are extremely happy to see that at XL, total price reduction was -1%, which shows the agility that we have to grow where it makes sense and to reduce exposure where the profitability is lower.
Thank you, Alban.
Thank you, Alban. Moving on to the next question.
Next question is from Ben Dyson from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Ben, please turn on your microphone and go ahead.
Okay. Thank you very much. Good morning. Just had a quick question on the Middle East war claims bill of EUR 100 million. I was just wondering if you could say which lines of business that's from, how much of it's reserves versus actual claims, and whether you're expecting any more from that in subsequent reporting periods. Just secondly, on the wildfires in France and Spain. I'm just interested if you could say anything about the potential magnitude of the claims from that for AXA. Obviously, it's still early days yet, just wondering if you could give any indication and how you're thinking about that as a potential loss in future periods. Thank you.
Thank you, Ben, for your two questions. I'll quickly comment on the second one and let Alban comment on the first one around the Middle East. On the wildfires in France and Spain, as I said earlier, we are still very early. The fires are still going on, certainly in France, our main focus at the moment is really helping our customers to get back to some kind of normality, which is very much focused on how can we simplify the procedures. How can we help them to relocate? How can we start paying claims so that they can get back to some kind of normality? It's far too early to say anything about potential claim numbers because we are still in the middle of it.
I want to remind you, that is also true for the Middle East, we have a strategy of diversification, both on the part of our assets, also on the part of our insurance risks. What you have seen, if you go back in the recent past, last three, four years, that we have been faced with many of these events, none of these events, yes, we were always concerned in these events, none of these events have touched us in a way that it has created any volatility in our results or any tears in our eyes. This is really the fruit of being highly diversified and having your finger in all pots, not too deeply. I let Alban now comment on the Middle East.
On the Middle East, as you know, in our traditional policies, war is an exclusion. We are exposed to war losses through a specific line of business, which is called War, Terrorism and Political Violence that we sell to some of our customers only. Through that line of business, we protect physical fixed assets such as factories in the region, also planes and vessels. The roughly EUR 100 million loss that we have mentioned at this stage is obviously an estimate because it's difficult, if not impossible, to visit some of those assets, the vast majority of that loss at this stage is not case reserves, IBNR. Nevertheless, we are very confident in the amount that we have booked.
In terms of exposures, obviously, with the reopening of the Strait, our exposure has come down very significantly when it comes to vessels, because a good number of them has been able to go through the Strait with the ceasefire.
Thank you, Alban.
Any additional question? No additional question.
Thank you. In that case, I thank you for your attention and certainly for your questions. I wish you a beautiful summer and good holidays. Thank you again.