Hello and welcome to Protector's presentation of the quarter four and 2021 results. We just came from a session with all employees this morning where we have of course talked about our DNA, and today we focused on the value open. We had a panel discussion with some of the leaders in the company and also a quiz involving both result questions, but also questions about some of the people in the company. Coming from that, I am always proud to be working in Protector and to be the captain of the Protector team and especially humble today when we deliver very strong 2021 results that are a result of a lot of hard and good work over time.
The summary, the highlights are that we are basically spot on the guidance we changed in quarter three, where we said that we kept the 10% local currency growth guidance, which we ended up with. It's 8% in Norwegian kroner, but 10% local currency for the year. 88% combined ratio for the year, which we slightly outperformed, and we also said that that was a bit on the conservative side, which also some of you commented on. That together with a great investment result of NOK 955 million, driven by the equity portfolio, gives us for the first time in Protector history a profit after tax above a billion at NOK 1.2 billion or NOK 15 per share.
The solvency ratio is 246% or actually 239% if you subtract a Tier 1 debt that has a call date in March. If you go from there and include the proposed dividend of NOK 7 for the 2021 results and the special dividend of NOK 3 for the 2020 result, you end up at 199%, 206% if that Tier 1 debt is still in our solvency. That's the highlights, obviously strong figures and I assume according to at least the analysts' expectations. If I go further in to the claims update, the weak number in today's results is related to the U.K. and is on the profitability.
I'm very happy that I have Stuart Winter, our country manager in the U.K., with me today to go a bit deeper into both the figures and the status in that business unit. As you can see on the full year claims ratios, the net result is a lot worse in the U.K. in 2021 than what it was in 2020. That is largely driven by a few very large losses on the motor side, personal injury losses, which are larger in the U.K. than what we are used to in the Nordics. In quarter four, there is also a storm claim in the U.K., and I'll get back to those on the next slide.
The other figure you see here on the negative side is the gross combined ratio, or claims ratio, sorry, in Denmark at 103%. It is improved from last year, however, affected by some losses on the workers' comp portfolio, which, you know, we have a loss transfer reinsurance agreement on 70% of that goes to a reinsurance agreement. That is one of the reasons why the difference on gross and net is so big in the claims numbers in Denmark. The other reason is a reserve increase on one large liability claim, mostly going to a reinsurance program. To the large losses.
In total, on a gross level, the large losses are just a percentage point below the normalized level, and that's what we would say is slightly lucky on large losses, but not very lucky. The special thing in 2021 is that most of those large losses have happened in the U.K., and those large losses are not necessarily related to the 2021 year, but they are losses that incurred earlier and that have had new information during 2021 that have increased those claims. As I mentioned, there is a storm claim in the U.K. in quarter four. The net run-off losses are very stable or no effect basically for the full year compared to 2.2 percentage points in 2020.
If I move on to the volume and the growth during the year, the contributors are Sweden and U.K., as you have seen previously. We also updated you on the growth including first of January or in January. The 10% local currency growth is supported by very good renewals during the year, and you've seen that in the previous quarterly reports. Also a total price increase level for the company in 2021 of 8.9%, which is above what we estimate as inflation. We talked a lot about inflation last time, so I'm not intending to spend that much time on that today.
When it comes to the January 1 renewal, which is 40% of our portfolio, and mainly the Nordics, it is a very strong growth at 11% in local currency. A lot of it comes from public sector, where both renewals have been strong, so a low client churn, few clients leaving our portfolio, and a good level of price increases. There is some growth in the commercial sectors in all countries as well, but in particular in Denmark. That's the growth side. We have looked at the claim statistics and the volume country by country. Here you see the totality with combined ratios as well.
As I've mentioned before, the weak point is the net combined in the U.K. The very strong point is Sweden. I would say that both of those numbers are closer together if you look at the underlying realities. Sweden is slightly worse than what you see due to reserve gains from previous years that we don't expect will repeat itself going forward, and some positive COVID effect on the motor side, whereas on the U.K. side, I have talked about the large losses. Other than that, strong results in Norway, Denmark, and Finland. To summarize, compared to the guiding, slightly better on combined ratio, spot on the volume guiding, and that's not intentional.
Like I also said last time, if we end up a lot above, I would be worried if I were you. If we end up a little bit below, I would not be worried. This ended up spot on, and that's just a fact. I've talked about the solvency, and we'll get back to that later as well. Now it is a pleasure to give the word to the Country Manager in the U.K., Stuart.
He comes from a long background in the insurance industry, much longer than me, of course, and has been both on the carrier side, insurance company side, but recently he came from the broker side as CEO of JLT Retail, and has a lot of experience in the claims handling area, which is important for us. Stuart, please take over.
Thank you. Thank you, Henrik. First of all, it's a real privilege and a pleasure to be here today reporting continued growth in the U.K. As you would have seen from the slide, 22% year-on-year. Could it have been more? Well, we always ask ourselves that question. The answer is undoubtedly yes. There's plenty of opportunity for further growth in the U.K., but we've maintained discipline, and discipline is very important to us and very strong focus in 2021 on retention. The team's grown. We've seen more modest growth in 2021 than we saw in 2019 and 2020, but that was deliberate. We front-loaded the recruitment of our team in order to prepare and plan for the expansion of the business with the overriding objective that it should always be people first.
That way, we can continue to service the business. We expect to see more modest growth in headcount in 2022 in continuation of that plan. As Henrik referenced earlier, our combined operating ratio isn't where we thought it would be or would like it to be, and principally that's been caused by the need to strengthen reserves on a couple of large personal injury cases that go back to the 2019 and 2020 underwriting or policy year. In fact, if you were to reproduce the table in front of you showing those losses allocated to the policy year, you would see deterioration in the result in 2019 and 2020, and a more positive result in 2021, but that isn't how it happened.
We expect that combined operating ratio will normalize more in the future, and we'll cover that a little bit further in the presentation. What's aided us along on our journey so far? If you put the next slide on, please. Well, I think for me, it's summed up by three words, and those words are culture and one team. We always expected to employ a large number of people over the last couple of years as we grow the business in the U.K. We certainly didn't expect to be employing them remotely, onboarding them remotely, and then operating for the best part of two years on a remote working basis. We've managed to do that, and the pandemic has really taught us how to undertake that process well and to manage it well.
We've got some great new colleagues that have joined the business. We've continued to build on the Protector culture and values, which were in place prior to Protector entering the U.K., and really developed this one team philosophy where we work across both London and Manchester as one team, regardless of geography. I've had some experience of working in regional businesses in the past, and getting people to work together is always very difficult. I've never witnessed anything like the one team approach that we have in Protector. That's to the credit of the people in the team. As we say here, every year we don't just concern ourselves with how the team operates.
We look at how succession is planned for the future in the business, how we manage and organize the team. With the growth in numbers that we've had over the last couple of years, we've looked at the management of the business across both commercial underwriting, public sector and housing underwriting, claims and risk management. We're growing the management team on a flat basis is the way that we've always operated it, but to build in additional strength for the future, and that's starting to show real good success. We also ask our broker partners what they think of what we do, how they rate us, how they consider our services compared to the rest of the market.
What's really interesting is that for the fifth consecutive year, Protector has been rated number one in terms of service provision by the brokers. There's a slide, the next slide will just show you the comparison to the market. As you see, not only are we ahead of our competitors by some fairly clear ground, but when you compare us to the average of our competitors, there's a very clear margin of differentiation. The brokers like us and the brokers support us, and they recognize that we do what we say we're going to do, and that helps us for the future. We go on to look at the operational status of the business. As we said before, there's plenty of opportunity in the U.K. We saw a large volume of business.
We typically quote quite a lot of public sector and housing business, pretty much all that we have the opportunity to see. We're more selective in the commercial sector. That's just the way those two sectors operate. We maintained our discipline in our approach. We undertake thorough risk analysis. We involve our risk engineers, we involve claims, we involve the entire business in looking at the risks that we underwrite. We had some relatively low hit rates, particularly, as we said there, in public sector and housing. That market runs a little bit counterintuitive, maybe behind the rest of the market, maybe even against the rest of the market. We didn't feel the pricing in 2021 was really at a level that we felt we could support, but we still grew.
In commercial, it's a bit more positive, although the motor market is starting to prove a bit challenging, and we are seeing some pricing that frankly doesn't meet with our models. We'll focus on discipline. We'll continue to look at retention as being a very important part of our strategy, and we're delighted with the fact that we've managed to move right forward quite successfully in those sectors. In terms of claims handling, this is really our shop window. This is how we demonstrate to our clients that they should buy our services and remain with us. We have what we call very strong clean desk. That means we have no backlog. We settle as many claims as we receive in a year. That's an important metric for us. We don't get behind. We focus very strongly on cost reduction.
We want to settle claims quickly and efficiently, but we want to do so at a cost level that's realistic. If I just mention two things from that list there, the first is that we've invested very heavily in our motor engineering capability in the U.K. The reason for that is we recognize that repair costs are escalating, and we need to do all we can to mitigate the increase in costs and make sure that we're competitive with the market. The other is in terms of recoveries. We've settled quite a few property claims in the U.K. over the last few years, and we have a number of cases where we're pursuing recovery against the insurers of other negligent parties. We anticipate that many of those recoveries will be progressed further in 2022, and that will have a positive impact.
What are our thoughts for 2022? In terms of gross written premium, we recognize that a large volume of our increased growth will be delivered by new sales. That's not surprising. As we said earlier, there's a good pipeline in the U.K., good opportunities, and we feel that we're well-positioned to be able to respond to those. There will still be some rate strength, so we still will get some price increases, and it's very likely that there will be some additional price increases consequent upon increased exposures as the U.K. economy returns to more normal levels following two years of restrictions that have been posed due to COVID-19. We also have to recognize that at the same time, if there's opportunity, there's also the potential for churn as well.
Other insurers will see our customers as opportunity for their development. We take a kind of wider view on churn in 2022 as well. While we haven't got any, don't present any numbers on these slides, that's deliberate. What we are saying here is that we're well prepared for the potential churn on our book. We will get some exposure growth, and we anticipate new sales will be strong as well. Obviously, the important focus is not on growth, it is on profitable growth. We've done some analysis on our combined operating ratio, which you'll see in the top table there as well. When we look at 2021, we ask ourselves some questions about what we'll replicate in 2022.
As we said earlier, we wouldn't expect the motor large losses to be at the same level as they are in 2021. In fact, we wouldn't have expected one of those claims in 5, maybe 10 years, certainly not 2 in the same year. We expect that will normalize. But we have to be cognizant of the fact that also there will be large losses. That's part of our business, and property large loss could be larger. Those two areas are quite volatile, so if we try to predict where we get to, we'll probably be precisely wrong. But our instinct is that that's where our positive development will be in 2022.
We will see some tailwinds from price increases that we've implemented in 2021, so we expect that there will be some residual impact in 2022 from rate increases, and we also expect that some sectors of the market will see price increasing greater than inflation. There will be some continued price increasing in 2022 as well. As for COVID, well, we think motor will return broadly to normal levels, so we won't see the same sort of benefits that we had in 2020 and 2021 in relation to reduced usage. We had a very small involvement in co-insurance of COVID BI losses. The vast majority of those will have been settled in 2021 or will be concluded earlier in this year, so we don't think that will have a net impact.
In terms of costs, well, as we said, we front-loaded our employment costs, so we expect that those will continue to normalize, and we will see some improvements through both increase in scale and efficiency gains. There's every reason to feel very optimistic and positive about 2022. I think it's a challenging market, but I think the challenger is there and ready and well placed, and we've got a great team of people working on it. Thank you.
Thank you, Stuart. From my point of view, I think that you should expect us to say clearly if we are worried about something and then address what we will do about it. When we say that we are not too concerned, like Stuart now have said about the U.K., then that's our honest opinion and best estimate. Of course, we could be wrong, but that's who we are. We say what we mean. I was just reminded that I should remind you to post questions. There is a link with the email address on our website.
Please send us questions if you have any during the presentation so that we have those questions when we are ready for those. There is a bit of a lag here. Over to investments, a very large part of our profit in 2021 and an important part of our business. The investment portfolio grows or the money that we can invest. I've been through the summary of 2021. I think it's more interesting to show you the bond and equity portfolios in a longer term. For the bonds, important thing in 2021, I think, is that the running yield is not changed from quarter three.
There have been no losses in the portfolio in 2021 and very few losses in a longer horizon. As you have seen, some of our overperformance in a historical perspective on the bond side has come in turbulent times. On the equity side, the interesting aspect here is that when you have more than 40% return during a year and the expected future return is unchanged from a year ago, something must have happened. That is both due to some changes in the portfolio. You have seen our largest position before we sold it was Multiconsult. It's sold, and there's also been other changes in our portfolio.
The very good element within that still high expected future return is that the operational performance of our portfolio companies have been very strong. Then again here it's the long term that matters and the long term has been very strong. Of course both the investment department and we are more concerned now that we've had good results very strong results than what we would have been if the results were worse just as a small comment to how we do this. Then it's over to some of the formal figures. Profit and loss as I mentioned first time above NOK 1 billion in profits for a year.
The balance sheet is strong, and the solvency capital ratio is, as I mentioned, actually 199% if you adjust for both the dividends and that Tier 1 debt that has a call date in March. No large changes in the composition of risks. Of course, we have grown, so the insurance risk is slightly higher. The investment portfolio and the equities have had a positive development that increases those, but no big change in the composition. We have some more capital, of course, from our operations, available.
To our process, I mentioned in quarter three that we would do a solid job on identifying risks, understanding our risks, and evaluate if we should change our shareholder distribution policy and capital management in the quarter four presentation. What we have done is we've focused obviously on the risks. Investments have always been there and we've been through that in a thorough way with what we would say are conservative stress tests. On the insurance side, we have of course stressed, but this time we've gone much more in detail there and also on some of the other risks, known and unknown. What we have focused on is on the risk side. That's what's important to us.
What can we face in a stressed scenario, and how can we mitigate that if there are instruments available? We have done that. We will continue to do that, continue to learn more, and when something changes, we may also change how we look upon the capital management in general. That's why we also have this quarterly process. The conclusion from everything we did is that what you have, many of you have given feedback on is a good shareholder distribution policy and capital management process does not need to be changed now. This is the same.
You see that with what the board proposes for the general meeting, annual general meeting in April, and the special dividend for the 2020 results, we are coming down on the solvency capital ratio, so below 200% then if you adjust for that, Tier 1 debt. We will continue to have quarterly assessments going forward and then we will evaluate the risks, the results, if they are as we expect them to be throughout 2022. You can all see that there could be an opportunity to distribute more of the capital.
You've seen this and then we are at the summary and very strong numbers with a growth according to the guidance and combined ratio slightly below very strong investment result and a solid position going into 2022. We are ready for questions, and I think we have received some at least, Amund.
Yes, we have. Great results, and many applause, the results of course. A question about growth. You have started 2021, 2022 very good. Is it reasonable to assume about 10% growth in local currency in 2022 since U.K. seasonality will kick in during 2022?
Yeah. We've said disciplined growth is what we go for and, of course, we have a good start with what we experienced in the Nordics, 1st of January. That's. I think the answer needs to be slightly boring. The reason is that the markets are volatile, at least where we see the biggest growth opportunities in the U.K. with the COVID situation making it a bit unpredictable, how much of the good opportunities will we see, how hungry will our competitors be, and where the price levels will be. What I can promise you is that it will be disciplined growth. Profitability is important, and the most important.
Of course, we've had a good start, and we've also had some positive news in the public sector side, U.K., before 1st of April, but it's very early, and it's very small numbers when we speak now.
Yeah. Moving on to profitability. If we should take a back-of-the-envelope calculation, it looks like the profitability for 2022 will be better than long-term guidance. Is that a fair assumption?
Yes. I think it is a fair assumption that it could be at least in the lower end of the long-term guidance. I think that what you need to look at is the large loss side is on a gross level, and I assume that you ask the question about net. That situation could be slightly different than it is. It's more of a difference in 2021. We've had less of the medium-sized losses, which you don't see in that overview, than a normalized situation. The other element is that there is a bit more uncertainty, talked about it before, on the inflation side.
If you calculate straightforward with normalizing for runoff and large loss and with some price increases, then I agree with the statement.
Good. Do you have any interesting updates in terms of your reinsurance? Yeah.
No, they're not very interesting because they are very similar. We've had a very good process in renewing our reinsurance agreements. The structures are mainly the same. We've increased our retention on a couple of the programs, the catastrophe program and U.K. casualty. The reason being that we see better value for money a little bit higher up, but still within our maximum retention, of course. The solvency based reinsurance deal is still in place, and we would have said something about it if it wasn't, with mainly the same terms, slightly lower cession to balance the agreement out.
Yeah. You touched upon this, but for the sake of repetition, what would you say is the expectation or normalized U.K. profitability or combined ratios?
Yeah. I think that's easier to speak about in a longer term because what Stuart showed us was a normalized large loss level for motor or personal injury and then one for the property side. What we know is that very unlikely that we hit a normalized level. It will either be below or above. To answer the question, it will be slightly higher combined ratio in the U.K. than what you will see in the Nordics. The reason is that in a new sales situation, it will be slightly lower margins than what you will have in the renewal book where it is possible to correct poor performing clients with price increases.
Yeah. If profitability stays as expected high, you will keep on gaining solvency capital ratio. Is there any other tools you could use than dividends?
Yes. For distribution, there is, of course, another tool and I guess that the question is about buyback. We have discussed it, but we have also had feedback. In our opinion, at least in the European markets, it looks, and in Norway, it looks very similar. For you to choose what you want to do with that money is what we think is the best way to do it. Of course, we're open to get more feedback on that.
I've received no further questions, but we are open for more questions at the email address stated on our webpage. Please feel free to add questions, and we will come back.
Thank you very much for participating, and we did reach a milestone actually yesterday, passing NOK 10 billion in market cap at 10:10 A.M., I was told. Actually, there have been some very happy shareholders who have given a small addition to all employees in Protector. Thank you all for listening and being part of our journey.