Thank you. 40 years since we began in 1985. I'm Prem Watsa, Chairman of Fairfax, and it's great to see all of you here. This is such a big pleasure for all of us at Fairfax to have all our wonderful shareholders with us. Many 25 years , 30 years with our shares in our company. Welcome to all our shareholders and employees across the world, it's being on the internet, and to all the people who support us. I wanted to begin by just saying that 40 years is a long time. 1985, the Dow Jones in that time was about ±1000.
Couldn't justify these high prices. We went to Adjusted EBITDA. Earnings before everything: interests, taxes, depreciation. It worked for some time, but then we went to 40,000, and now we're heading close to 50,000 on the Dow Jones. As you'd expect, we had to use a better formula. That's this, Adjusted EBITDA: earnings before Iran, tariffs, and Donald's announcements. I don't know what the next variation is going to be like. We celebrated our 40th anniversary since we began. Best year in our history, as you know. Net income increased to $4.8 billion. Our company has been transformed since 2022. I've said that for the last four years. Gross premiums are up in the four years by 40%. Underwriting profit, 127%. Interest and dividend income is up 302%. Book value per share is up 100% in those four years.
Book value increased by 21% in 2025 to $1,260 per share. That's in U.S. dollars. Our stock price increased by 31% in CAD 2,616. Now, you'll remember that we announced that with passing of Mr. Athappan, one of the world's best underwriters, we were instituting a cup to be awarded to one company each year for underwriting excellence. In 2024, that award was presented to Silvy Wright and Northbridge. This year I'm happy to announce the award goes to Allied World. We acquired Allied World in 2017. Come on in there. It's been a phenomenal performance. I've said it in our annual report. Lou Iglesias.
Thank you very much.
It's amazing. Yeah.
Thank you. Do I get to take this with me?
He has to return it. We've got something else for him, but this is a rolling trophy. Congratulations, Lou.
Thank you.
Last year, we also announced an award in honor of Eric Salsberg, who is the heart and soul of Fairfax. We are very pleased to announce the 2025 winner is Arleen Paladino, and she's with Crum & Forster since 1979, became the CFO in 2017, and since then, she has built a best-in-class finance department, and her influence extends right through the company. Most importantly, she exemplifies our culture. Arleen Paladino. Arleen, fantastic. Come here. We take a photograph now. Thank you, Arleen.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Hey, Arleen, one minute. This is the plaque that comes. Her name is going to. There's Silvy right there. Bijan was last year's winner, and Arleen is this year's winner. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Also in honor of Rick Salzberg, we announced that we would help fund a memorial leadership lecture series in Ricky's name at the University of Toronto Law School. We are happy to say the inaugural lecture was held January of this year in front of a packed house, and it involved a panel of established leaders, a ton of lawyers, and it went really, really well. I invite you to join us for the next one in 2027. As we've often said, our people are our greatest asset. The health and wellbeing remain our top priority. It's now almost a year since we lost Vinod, and we continue to honor his memory by strengthening our focus on the heart health of our employees and their families. This commitment has already saved many people across our organization, and we give these tests.
We look after, pay for these tests all over our companies in the world. The Fairfax Presidents' Innovation Award was created in 2017, many years ago, and to recognize teams whose innovations have had a transformative and positive impact on their organization. This year, an impressive 33 initiatives were submitted with a diverse range of innovative products. It's fantastic to see. That's the beauty of decentralization. All Fairfax companies continue to innovate within their markets. After reviewing all the submissions, we are happy to announce that ARX from Ukraine has been selected as the winner. We have, I think, right here. There it is. ARX defied industry. That's right, from Ukraine, defied industry expectations by launching a sustainable war risk insurance product. Congratulations to the team.
It is now more than four years since Russia invaded Ukraine, and as I mentioned last year, our presidents are keeping our people safe, and they are heroes working under extraordinary conditions, and our business is doing exceptionally well. Now I want to take a moment to recognize Andriy Oleksiy and Slava from ARX and Connor. Very happy to have Oleksiy here in person. Oleksiy, come right in. Give him a nice round of applause.
Thank you. Good to see you.
Come right there. And I think you can see Oleksiy all over the world where you can get this. Oleksiy, thank you for joining us, and thank you for the wonderful work you've done in Ukraine. Give a nice round of applause.
Thank you. Thank you all. I am not going to miss this opportunity to say a great thanks to you, Prem, and to the whole Fairfax, on behalf of all our employees and my colleagues in Ukraine, because we are feeling strong support since the first day till now, and we believe till it will be necessary. Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Oleksiy. With the conflict in Iran, unfortunately, members of the Fairfax family once again found themselves in harm's way. GIG management is ensuring that all our employees in the Gulf region have the support that they need to stay safe. A big thank you to Bijan, Farid, and Paul Adamson. Give them a nice round of applause. You know we treat our employees as one big family, and we do not want to have layoffs like you have seen recently in the tech industry or other industries, particularly when they're in such strong financial shape. We are careful in adding employees because we don't like layoffs.
While Fairfax and our employees have been a great place to work, where we do not tolerate or condone any form of racism or discrimination, we still know that it has not been eradicated in our society, even in 2026. As you know, in 2020, we created the Fairfax Black Initiatives Action Committee under the Chairmanship of Craig Pinnock, the CFO of Northbridge, to make our company even more attractive for people from the Black community and other minorities. We're grateful to say we have maintained our strong partnership with the BlackNorth Initiative, reaffirming our commitment to eradicating anti-Black systemic racism through collective efforts across corporate Canada. When I speak of racism, we are shocked and saddened by the antisemitism that has risen in Canada, the United States, and many parts of the world. It should not be tolerated. There is no place for antisemitism, period.
I wanted to make sure we all understand that. Since the inception of Fairfax, we have always been focused on a few things, the way we operate, the way we treat each other, and the way we help our communities. Our management team and board ensure that honesty and integrity are never compromised and that full disclosures provide to all our shareholders. We follow the golden rule, treat people like you want to be treated yourself. We now have 22,000 employees around the world working in a decentralized environment following these basic principles. I'm pleased to say we recently posted our fifth ESG environment, social, and governance report on our website, and we're always focused on ESG. While it is our fifth report, we have been following ESG principles since we began 40 years ago.
We just didn't call it ESG. I've always said this, and I repeat, we are very blessed to have such a wonderful group of shareholders, long-term shareholders. Many of you have been shareholders for 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, and maybe even longer, and through the ups and downs of business life. A warm welcome again. Now, the biggest asset that we have is not on the balance sheet. The biggest moat in our company is our culture, and it's not on our balance sheet. The creation and preservation of that culture is the biggest achievement for us over the past 40 years and the continuing driver of our success. It'll continue because Fairfax is not for sale. I've considered myself, before, I've told you, as a steward. I don't own the company because I cannot sell it. Stewards can't sell.
I am looking forward to this company going forward long after I'm gone. The fair and friendly culture, which is in our name, is why companies all over the world want to deal with us. It's our biggest advantage, and we guard it fiercely. They trust us. I also want to take this opportunity to thank our directors, all 12 of them, for their strong support of our company. Now, one of our directors is retiring. Robert Hartog, our Lead Director and Chair of the Audit Committee since we began in 1985. Many of you might remember Robert. He introduced me to David Johnston when Robert retired in 2006. We had lunch with David, and thus began a 20-year relationship.
David was the dean of the law school at the University of Western Ontario, Principal of McGill University, President of the University of Waterloo, and chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers. The Harvard board made David chair. David was the best governor general Canada has ever had. We were very fortunate to have David as our director all these years, and we wish David and Sharon, their five daughters, and hear there's 14 grandchildren, a long and happy retirement. Let's give David Johnston a nice round standing ovation for David. David will always be a friend of Fairfax and a very close friend of me. Over our 40-year history, we have always operated at Fairfax with an outstanding small team with great integrity, team spirit, and no egos. Protects our company from unexpected downside risks and which takes advantage of opportunities as and when they arise.
This group has worked together for a long time with trust and long-term focus, as you'll see in my presentation. I want to recognize Peter Clarke, who is our President, has been with us for 29 years, and his first job was with Fairfax, and he will join me for the presentation. He's going to do half the presentation, I'm going to do half, and he'll join me for the Q&A also after we go through the formal part of the meeting. Peter runs now all our quarterly conference calls with Amy Sherk, our CFO, and Wade Burton, our Chief Investment Officer. Peter Clarke, let's give him a nice round of applause. I am not retiring, but I wanted all of you to get to know our talented team. I am watching, of course, with great interest.
In November 2025, we announced that Bill McMorrow and his management team will take Kennedy Wilson private with the help of Fairfax. We have invested with Bill since 2010 and have done exceptionally well over that time period. All our investments with Bill and Kennedy Wilson have worked out very well. When Bill suggested we take Kennedy Wilson private, we were very pleased to be his partner. On February 17th, 2026, Kennedy Wilson announced that their special committee had accepted $10.90 per share from Bill and us, a 46% premium from the price of $7.47 since it traded at before the offer. We are very excited to have Bill, Matt, and his team join the Fairfax team. I wanted to give them a nice round of applause. Bill McMorrow.
Now, we didn't have a chance to thank Alan Kestenbaum of Stelco, and I think Alan is right here. We put some money with him, about $200 million at $20 a share. He called me one day at about 10:00 P.M. and said, "Time to sell for $70 a share." I said, "Alan, I thought you were looking at $140." He said, "$20 - $70, Prem, is much easier than $70 - $140." He timed it perfectly. At the rate of return for us, this is in 2018, we sold it in 2024, 29% in six years. Alan Kestenbaum, give him a nice round of applause. I got to also introduce SIGMA, a waterworks construction company. This is a friend of mine who's been my friend for 58 years. We went to the same engineering school in India.
He created a company and he sold it in 2007, and 10 years later, we helped him acquire it back again in 2017. We invested $41 million, and he gave us back $327 million, a compound growth rate of 31%. Victor Pais. Give him a nice round of applause. Victor. Finally, I wanted to thank David Sokol. We put some money with David in 2018, quite some time back, and at $6.50. We put more money in, and eventually we put $1 billion too with David at $9.40. We've just sold half, as you've seen, half our shares at $28.30. The biggest gain we've made and it was because of David Sokol. Outstanding entrepreneur, outstanding manager, done a fantastic job. A 25% compounded rate of return. David Sokol, give him a nice round of applause. I wanted to recognize all of them.
Just very quickly, Jonathan Alderson. Many young families suffer from autism. Jonathan has done a wonderful job. He's here. He's developing something called Thrive. I bring that to your attention again. In January of this year, we had our investor trip. We have an investor trip to India, and we restarted it last year after a five-year gap due to the pandemic. We talked about it last night. It's an outstanding trip. Trip of a lifetime, and it gives our shareholders an opportunity to interact with our leadership. You meet lots of our companies in India, and you really have a wonderful time. All the participants who go for this trip think it's a trip of a lifetime. This time, Peter Clarke and Luanne will be joining the trip. You'll really get to know Peter over that week.
Peter Clarke, why he's such an exceptional guy. The dates are from January 9th to the January 16th. In the foyer outside the auditorium, you can proceed to Thomas Cook booth for more information. Kashi Rao is there. Recommended highly. It's limited to 25 couples. That's our trip of a lifetime. I've introduced our management team in the past. They're all here. You have a chance to see them. Our presidents of our companies, presidents of many of our non-insurance companies, and you saw the pictures going before we began. These are the leaders. I happen to be one here, but these are the leaders who keep Fairfax going. That's why I'm so excited about the possibilities for Fairfax, all the leaders that we have here. We are really blessed with a very unusual group of smart, hardworking, and trustworthy people who lead our companies.
You'll see their long tenure. I'm going to talk about that. In the foyer, we have about 38 booths of the companies, our insurance companies, our non-insurance companies. The company that sells some food, like Recipe and Keg, they're all there. The leaders are there to answer any questions you might have. We have the Ivey Business School showcasing the Ben Graham Chair in Value Investing with Professor George Athanassakos. He had another conference yesterday. Outstanding what he's done and brought value investing to Canada, and one of the best value investing conferences in the world. We have the co-op students from the University of Waterloo. Then I just wanted to say we began our donations program about 35 years ago, and it's gone up very significantly. Under the leadership of many people, this has been produced. "Why We Give." It's a really lovely document.
It's by all of our individual companies, insurance companies. Then we put the 2% of what we donate, 1% goes into the foundation and for bigger projects. It's really well done. I recommend it to you. On your way out, you can pick it up. Then we are happy to give you this. This one you have to pay. This is 50 years of Chairman's letters. You can easily get it if you want to. Some of you might want to look at it. Most of you don't want to, but it's available. Cost you $50. Dave Thomas has done a terrific book for us. This is really we meant it for our own people, but he is selling it and we really thank him. Done a terrific book, "The Fairfax Way." It's also discounted at $20 for the book. Dave is right here.
Give Dave a nice round of applause. It's a lovely book. Our latest investment, Under Armour, has got a nice hat for you with Fairfax, and not expensive, and beautiful backpack also for sale, not for free. They've really produced very good products, as you'll see. I think that gets me. As we've done in the past 40 annual meetings, we'll go quickly through the formal meeting, give a short presentation with slides, and have a Q&A with Peter and myself after the slides. Should we just. You can submit your questions in real time on this platform. You can send it. We've got Jeff Stacy there, and we'll have five, one, two, three, four stations plus Jeff, and to take any of your questions after the presentation. Now let's begin the formal part of the meeting. Thank you.
I'll put that in here. The formal part of the meeting is, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this meeting. I'm Prem Watsa, Chairman. Derek Bulas is the Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, Corporate Secretary of Fairfax. I shall appoint Shirley Tom and Louise Waltenbury of Computershare Trust Company to act as scrutineers and to compute the votes of any polls taken at this meeting, and to report there on to me as Chairman. I can report that as a result of reviewing an affidavit of mailing and a preliminary report of the scrutineers, I'm satisfied that notice of this meeting has been duly given and a quorum is present, that this meeting is therefore properly constituted, called, and constituted. Today's agenda will consist of tabling the annual report, which is here. Nice 40 years nice, bright color. You can't miss it. That's there for you.
It's to elect our Board of Directors, second, to reappoint our auditors, and third, to consider the shareholder proposal that we received from Investors for Paris Compliance on behalf of The Salal Foundation. I propose to move quickly through the formal business, announce that the minutes of the previous annual meeting held on April 10th are available for inspection by a request to the Fairfax corporate secretary, as well, and now formally place the annual report, which includes the company's financial statements, the auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers statement. I declare that the total number of votes attached to the shares represented in the meeting by proxy have been directed to be voted in favor of the election of the board of directors, and the reappointment of our auditors. In each case, not less than 94% of all votes.
Finally, I declare that the total number of votes attached to the shares represented at this meeting by proxy, which have been directed to be voted against the shareholders' proposal, is not less than 80% of all votes that may be cast at the meeting. Voting today will be conducted by electronic ballot for those attending. For here, that'll be a show of hands, and I'll ask for the balloting to be opened to the registered holders and appointed proxy holders. The polls are now open on the platform, and at this point, all registered holders and proxy holders attending virtually who have properly logged in will be able to vote. Following the presentation, Jen Allen will confirm when the polls are closed. Once the electronic balloting closes, your votes will be submitted. Now I'll go to the election of directors.
With your consent, I will now move directly to the election of directors. I now invite nominations for directors.
I am Jennifer Allen, and I nominate as directors for the corporation for the ensuing year, Robert Gunn, Karen Jurjevich, Christine Magee, William McFarland, Christine McLean, Brian Porter, Timothy Price, Lauren Templeton, Benjamin Watsa, Prem Watsa, and William Weldon.
Thank you, Jen. Are there any further nominations? As no other nominations for directors have been received and as the number of directors nominated is exactly the number to be elected, I confirm that those 11 nominees are proposed for election as directors of the company. Given the hybrid meeting and the fact that we will also conduct a virtual vote, we will have a vote on this together with the next resolution. I now invite a resolution regarding the appointment of an auditor.
I move that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP be appointed as auditors of the corporation to hold office until the next annual meeting.
Thank you, Amy.
I'll second that motion.
Thank you. For those attending in person, I would ask that you please vote for resolutions one and two by a show of hands. All in favor? Any contrary? Can't see any contrary. The final item of the business is to consider the shareholder proposal submitted by Investors for Paris Compliance on behalf of the Salal Foundation. At this time, I recognize Kiera Taylor, representative of Investors for Paris Compliance to present this proposal and take a motion that is to put to vote. Mrs. Taylor, please go ahead.
Good morning, Mr. Watsa, members of the board, and fellow shareholders. I'd like to start where I believe we agree. Fairfax has built something genuinely rare, a company built on long-term thinking, patient capital, and stewardship over decades. In a world obsessed with quarterly results, this is a philosophy worth defending. It also provides a useful lens when considering the proposal before you today. Climate risk, already costing hundreds of billions in damages each year, is becoming an increasingly larger risk as time goes on. For an investor, this will influence winners and losers in the equity market, and for an insurer, it greatly affects underwriting risk. Fairfax has already stated that climate change represents a material risk to its business. The question raised by this proposal is whether shareholders have sufficient transparency to understand how that risk is being measured and managed across the enterprise.
The board has indicated that Fairfax is already assessing climate-related risks internally. That work is important and encouraging. At the same time, investors rely on disclosure to evaluate how material risks are being addressed. Internal analysis does not provide investors with decision-useful information. For example, the commitment to hold assets over the long term invites reflection on the kinds of exposures that are being financed and underwritten over that same time horizon. Shareholders need insights into the significant exposure Fairfax has to high-emitting sectors, which face transition risks set to compound over decades. Fairfax is currently the third-largest underwriter of fossil fuel projects globally. The Iran oil and gas shock has exposed the serious security vulnerabilities of fossil fuels. Sharing Fairfax's financed emissions disclosures with appropriate context around estimates and evolving methodologies would help bridge that gap.
It would allow shareholders to better understand the company's exposure and to track progress over time. There has also been discussion about timing, including whether such disclosure is premature in advance of regulatory requirements. Many investors view voluntary disclosure of material risks a good part of good governance. Therefore, investors already expect this disclosure, particularly when many peers have taken similar steps, some several years ago already. The board has also highlighted data challenges. These are widely recognized across the financial sector. Most large financial institutions have already begun reporting financed emissions and clearly note assumptions and limitations so that their processes can improve over time. Without trying, there can be no iterative process. Beginning with an initial disclosure can help establish the systems and governance needed for more refined analysis later. Finally, Fairfax's decentralized structure is a strength that allows for entrepreneurial management and local decision-making.
At the same time, investors evaluate Fairfax on a consolidated basis, and group-level disclosure complements that structure by providing a clearer picture of overall performance, just as we are doing here today. This proposal is intended to support that complementary process. The request itself is modest. It asks Fairfax to disclose financed emissions across material scopes in absolute terms as a first step. This is not a request for targets or strategic shifts, but for measurement and transparency. Fairfax has an identity as a contrarian institution that resists noise, pressure, and market fashions, and that instinct has served the company well. I'd ask the board to consider whether, in this case, that same instinct may lead to filing climate risk in the wrong category as simply outside pressure to be resisted rather than systemic long-term financial risk. Thank you for your consideration.
Thank you very much, Ms. Taylor. Would someone second the motion?
I second the motion.
Thank you, Ms. Wang. I would direct your attention to Schedule A of Fairfax's management policy circular, which describes in detail the position of the board and management on this matter. The board of directors recommend that shareholders vote against this shareholder proposal. We will now proceed to a vote on the shareholder proposal. For those attending in person, I would ask that you please vote by a show of hands, and then I, again, remind those attending in person that our board recommends voting against this proposal. All in favor? Contrary? Thank you. We will now take a brief pause for 60 seconds to allow registered holders and proxy holders to complete their electronic voting in all of the motions brought forth at this meeting. Jen Allen will start a timer.
Mr. Chairman, the voting is now complete, and the polls are closed.
Thank you very much, Jen. I have been advised by the scrutineers that the proxies deposited for the meeting have now been voted. I can confirm that the nominated directors have been appointed as directors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting. In addition, I confirm that PricewaterhouseCoopers has been appointed as auditors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting. On the shareholder proposal, the voting results show that approximately 80% of the votes cast were against the proposal. As there are a greater number of votes against than in favor, this motion is not carried, and the shareholder proposal has not passed. We will file a report on SEDAR setting out the voting results following the meeting. I propose now to terminate the meeting. After that, I'd like to talk about our company, plus a Q&A session.
I now invite a motion for termination.
I move that this meeting be terminated.
Thank you, Jen.
I second the motion.
Thank you, Amy. I declare the meeting terminated. Thank you very much. Now we go to our presentation. Now, we've done it for a long time. Peter, come on in. I'm going to talk about some of the principles, and Peter's going to talk specifically. Peter's going to talk about the operations of the company, and so we'll just go straight into the presentation, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. We always start with our guiding principles. They're the moat. They're the set of principles that distinguishes Fairfax. It's these principles. The objectives, very simply, to provide outstanding service to our customers, look after our employees who provide that service, make a return for our shareholders, and never forget the communities that we operate in. Recognize that we're all very fortunate.
You can't take a long-term view unless you're soundly financed and always provide full disclosure to our shareholders. Second is structure. I have found decentralized structures that we've had all these years, in spite of the ups and downs, works wonderfully. We are decentralized except for performance evaluation, succession planning, acquisitions, financing, investments that are done by Fairfax. Complete and open communication between our companies and ourselves. We've done it for years. Share ownership, large incentives encouraged only for performance, not for the top line. Very dangerous in the financial business to have incentive for the top line. We remind ourselves we're not an operating company. Our values are most important section here, right in the first one. Honesty and integrity, essential in all our relationships, will never be compromised. Results-oriented, not political. Shows you the type of people who feel comfortable at Fairfax.
Team players, no egos. Confrontational style not appropriate. We value loyalty to Fairfax and our colleagues. We follow the golden rule. We treat others as we would want to be treated. Hardworking, not at the expense of our families. That's an odd one to put in a company, but we do. We don't want to succeed at the expense of our families. We always look for opportunity. We're always looking at the downside, making sure that we survive the downside, and then look at the upside and we make mistakes. We made a ton of mistakes. Most of you who've been with us for a long time will remember them. We try to learn from them and go forward. We never bet the company on any project or acquisition, and we believe in having a few laughs at the office.
That's our values, and it served us very well for a long time. Here's the golden rule, and I've shown you this before. That's about 20 faiths, the major faith groups. They all follow this principle. This time I wanted to just take Judaism. "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary." Right from their scriptures. How about Islam? "Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself." How about Hinduism? I've taken the big ones. "This is the sum of duty. Do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you." Finally, Christianity. "In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets." Amazing, isn't it?
Too, the other faiths have the same principle. Do to others what you want done for you, and we've tried to follow that all these years. Our formula is very simple. I've shown it to you for 40 years. Disciplined underwriting, not on the top line, value investing, and over that time, you get superior long-term returns, not in any one year, not in five years, over time, and that's our rate of return there. The 40-year compounding, you can see there. Our stock price was 3.25, 3.23 to be exact, but 3.25, and it's traded at $1,900 million. That's in U.S. dollars, the Fairfax stock price. Book value is in U.S. dollars too. You can see the S&P 500 during that same time period, the rate of return. Our stock price has gone up 19.5%. If you look at...
This is a fascinating slide. I showed it in our annual report, and I just highlight it for you. It's very end date sensitive. If 2020 you'd have looked at 434, our rate of return was still pretty good, but 16%, and as the stock price goes up, 19.5% rate of return over time. The last five years have been very good to us. I've told you before that in 1985, there were 6,000 companies listed in the United States on all the exchanges. 600 still continue in their present form. The rest of them are taken over, bankrupt, whatever. They don't exist in their form. Then you say, how many companies did get more than 15% return? That's 56 companies, which is less than 1% of the 6,000. We are very grateful, very blessed.
We're fortunate to have a 19.5% return, and you can see that ranks us number seventh. If you look at the profits in Canada, net income last year, we made $4.8 billion, and you say, where does that rank us? That ranks us at the 10th largest company in Canada. This is a company that never made a $1 million in 1985, prior to 1985. We're very grateful and not proud, but grateful. Grateful means you didn't do it yourself. You had blessings from above. That's why we're not proud. We're very grateful for all the blessings we've had. Who has done it? All of this is from our executives. Peter and I are there, but you can see Andy Barnard. You can see Brian Young. They came together as a team. John Varnell, you can see at the last line there, 39 years.
You can see Peter Clarke's been with us for 28 years. This is ending last year, and now 29 years, with lots of our officers have been with us for a long time. Outstanding management. You can see Brian Young there, as I told you, 30 years. Khaled, second row to the right, just retired, 48 years with GIG. 48 years. GIG was just being formed. You can see Vasily, which is at the third row, right to the right. Vasily is 18 years. He's taken over Eurolife, and Alex has become chairman, and he's also chairman of our Cyprus company that we acquired. Been with us for a long time. If you go the next one, the outstanding investment team that we have. Roger Leigh is 40 years here, worked with him for at least 10 years before that.
Brian Blaser, 39 years here, another 10 years before that. We've worked together for more than 50 years. Young Wade Burton, 18 years, taking it forward. Wade Burton is the succession for us. You can see all the others that we have and the time they've been with us. Chandran there for 32 years. Lots of gratitude for that management team, holding company presidents, and the investment committee. With that, I'm going to pass it on to Peter Clarke, who's going into the operations. Give him a nice round of applause. Peter.
[Distorted Audio] . Thank you. Thank you very much, Prem, and good morning to everyone here today.
You might have seen this slide before, but this slide is a high-level view of our insurance operations that generate the $33 billion of gross premiums we write. Not included in this is the non-consolidated companies Digit, Albingia, and BIC, which would add another approximately $2 billion to this number at the 100% level. The seven companies starting on the left make up approximately 80% of our gross premium, primarily in North America, although many have global operations. In particular, Odyssey Group, Brit, and Allied World. The remaining 20% of our premium is our international operations. Although only 20% of the total, it is over $6 billion in premium, and that is more than all of Fairfax 15 years ago. We are very excited about the prospects of our international operations.
In many of the countries, the insurance penetration is very low, and we expect it to increase, supported by strong GDP growth in those countries. Each of our companies are separately capitalized, as Prem said, with a President, CFO, and run on a decentralized basis. This structure not only provides the many benefits of empowering our people, but provides great financial flexibility for the group and a very flat structure where information can flow very quickly. As we always say, bad information, bad news, comes up quickly, goes right to Andy and Brian, then to Prem and I, and the good news can come on the regular quarterly reporting. Over the past 40 years, we have built out our insurance operations to be one of the top 20 property casualty groups in the world. Not easy to replicate, especially in the short term.
As we have said in the past, the company has been transformed since 2017. This corresponds with our acquisition of Allied World and a hard insurance market that began in 2019. Underwriting profit, you can see, increased from a loss of $600 million to a record profit of $1.8 billion in 2025, with three consecutive years of underwriting profit above $1.5 billion. Within our underwriting profit, we have absorbed on average $1 billion of catastrophe losses in each of the last three years and had favorable reserve development each year. Interest and dividend income has increased from $600 million to $2.6 billion, and our share of profits of associates has increased from $200 million to almost $1 billion. Today, all steady contributors to our net earnings. You can see our investment portfolio at approximately $40 billion in 2017 has almost doubled to $75 billion in 2025.
In total, our operating income, this is for our insurance companies only, has increased from a loss of $200 million in 2017, or income of approximately $1 billion normalized for catastrophe losses, is $4.6 billion today, up over four times over this time period. Most importantly, our shares outstanding have decreased from $28 million - $21 million at year-end. That's a 25% decrease over that time period. When we talk about all these metrics on a per share basis, they've increased significantly more. For the last three years, we have said we can see a strong base of operating income now running at $5 billion on a consolidated basis, and we continue to see that for the next three to four years. Of course, nothing is certain, so there's no promises.
This consists of interest and dividend income of +$2.5 billion, underwriting profit of $1.5 billion, and share of profits of associates of +$1 billion as well. All this adds up to the $5 billion of operating income and potentially $150 EPS after taxes, interest expense, and other expenses. This is before any net investment gains or losses on our net income. Although net gains has always been a significant contributor to our growth and book value, you can only look at that over the long term. Gains will fluctuate from quarter to quarter, or for that matter, year to year, both up and down. In our mind, that's only important over the long term. Now for our income statement for 2025. As I said before, gross premiums of $33 billion. That's up 2% from 2024.
We continue to benefit greatly from our scale and our diversification of our premium base, both by geography and by product. Our combined ratio was 93%, producing an underwriting profit of $1.8 billion, notwithstanding significant losses from the California wildfires in the first quarter of 2025. As Prem mentioned before, I should note, we have no top-line targets at Fairfax or none of our companies are compensated for top-line growth. Everything is bottom line and focused on underwriting profit. Investment income was very strong and included net gains on investments of $3 billion, producing an overall investment return of 9.3% for the year, an excellent return in 2025. Finally, this resulted in net earnings for the year, record earnings of $4.8 billion and of growth in book value of 20.5% adjusted for our $15 million dividend.
Prem has mentioned every year the importance of float and how it is a huge benefit of the property and casualty insurance business, and I just wanted to repeat that once again this year. Our float exceeded $40 billion in 2025, almost $2,000 per share, and has compounded by 18% since inception. Over the last 10 years, we have had cumulative underwriting profit of $8 billion or a benefit of 3.2% on our float. That means we were paid to hold the float. In the last five years, cumulative underwriting profit of $7 billion or a benefit on the float of 4.5%. This is before any investment income off the float. You can see why we really like the property casualty business. As I said before, we benefit greatly from our diversified global operations. We operate all across the world.
We have 22,000 employees with underwriting operations in 50 countries, and we do business in over 100 countries. You can see we have most of the world covered, and over the last number of years, we have been focusing on organic growth, which our companies have done an exceptional job at during the hard market, more than doubling our premiums. We benefit greatly from the experience of our presidents and the management teams that run our companies, especially on managing the cyclical nature of the insurance business. This is very, very important, not only in the hard market years, but likely more important in the soft markets. Our investment portfolio is $75 billion and is managed by Hamblin Watsa on a long-term, value-oriented philosophy with capital preservation a priority.
The investment portfolio is well-positioned today to take advantage of the volatile macro environment with over 40% of the portfolio in cash and U.S., Canadian government bonds. Interest and dividend income of $2.5 billion has an average maturity of three years. Our mortgage portfolio, in partnership with Kennedy Wilson, continues to produce outstanding results, producing stable interest income. Our portfolio has limited exposure to corporate credit, and anything we do have is very short-term and no private credit other than positions in other strategic investments. Our common stocks, at 25% of our portfolio, are very well-positioned with great management teams and we believe continue to have significant upside over the long term.
Not included in our portfolio or in our book value at year-end is $3.1 billion of market value that is in excess of our carrying value for our investments in associates and listed consolidated non-insurance operations. Adjusted for the increased valuation of Poseidon or Atlas from our recently announced sale, that total unrealized gain was $4.2 billion, or about $200 per share on a pre-tax basis. At year-end, we carried Poseidon at $15.50 per share. That was our carrying value. We had a fair value of $20 per share, and in the first quarter, we announced that we sold half our position at $28.30 per share. This represents a pre-tax gain of $865 million. Like I said, the difference between market value and carrying value is not in our book value until the sale is realized.
Increased interest in dividend income has been a significant contributor to our increased earnings for the last three years, and we expect that to continue. Our current run rate is approximately $2.7 billion today. Prior to 2023, with interest rates at historical lows, our duration was less than one and a half years and provided us the opportunity to extend duration and benefit from higher rates as interest rates increase significantly in 2022. We continue to have great optionality in our fixed income portfolio with 20% in cash and short-term treasuries, and as I said before, with very limited exposure to corporate credit. As we wait for opportunities to arrive, we're earning a 5% return on our fixed income portfolio. Hamblin Watsa has produced excellent investment returns over the long term, with an average return of 7.7% since inception.
You can see there's only been four years in 40 that we had an investment loss in the year, and each of those were primarily due to unrealized mark-to-market losses, which reversed in the following year. Capital preservation is key, and Hamblin Watsa has done an exceptional job at protecting on the downside. You can see how our investments performed in some of the most significant declines in the markets, namely 1987, the dot-com bust in 2000 - 2002, the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and then again in COVID in 2020. Finally, our financial position remains very strong and is always our first priority. Our holding company cash and investments is at $2.7 billion at year-end. In addition, in the holding company, we have investments in associates and consolidated non-insurance investments of $2.2 billion.
We continue to opportunistically refinance our near-term maturities with a target of no significant maturities for three years and have a CAD 2 billion credit facility. Our shareholder equity increased CAD 3.3 billion in 2025, driven by net earnings, and we purchased 1 million shares for CAD 1.6 billion during the year. Our debt leverage ratios remain within our targets, and we expect they will trend lower as our equity base continues to grow. Our leverage increased year over year from the refinancing of our preferred shares with 30-year debt, with favorable economics, and our interest coverage before gains is very strong at 9-10 times interest expense. Our insurance companies are well-capitalized with strong net earnings producing excess capital that will provide significant dividends to the holding company.
We have many opportunities to allocate capital, including growing our insurance operations at the right time, acquiring minority interest in our existing companies, attractive investments, and of course, buying back our own shares. None of course at the expense of our financial position. Thank you, and I'll now pass it back to Prem.
Thank you. Give him a round of applause. Thank you, Peter. Very well done. We're just a few more slides, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Non-insurance investments, you can see Recipe, Peak, Sleep Country Canada, all of them there. $8.5 billion of revenue, U.S. dollars, and the $400 million is reflecting the all other. We took some write-offs, $137 million. If this is all quasi 100% owned, if you take the associates, which is like 20% or above, 20%-50% associates like Seaspan, Eurolife, you get about $1 billion. That $397.4 million, take the write-off off, and then you add the associate, get about $1 billion that Peter was talking about. Investments in India, we've taken it in terms of fair value $4.3 billion. If you take the amount we control, it's more like +$7 billion, and this is the equity.
If you take the enterprise value, it's much, much higher. This is the equity that we have, and Fairfax India, we think as you heard in that Fairfax India presentation, the returns could be much higher in the future. Eurobank, this is really a fantastic experience for us. I gave you the stock price EUR 31, EUR 1, and then EUR 38.38. Here's the euro price and the net cash invested was about EUR 1 billion. Then Fokion Karavias, who's here with us, who runs Eurobank, pays out more than 50% in either a dividend or a stock buyback. Because we own a third of the company, we have to sell. We can't go above 33% because then there's a takeover offer for everybody.
You see our net cash invested goes from $1 billion in 2024, $600 million, $500 million because of the buybacks, and the market value just gone the other way. Here it shows a total return in euros of EUR 4 billion. It's really unrealized, but it's the best return we've ever made in terms of amounts. We got a 15% compounded, but it's $4 billion. Poseidon sale, we've talked about it, been phenomenal. David has done an outstanding job. I just highlighted some of the key parameters which we've given in our annual report. It's quite amazing what great leadership does, and we're fortunate to have been a shareholder with David. Every year we talk about business can be a force for good, and over 40 years I've seen that. Cumulative premiums, if you add it all up, $324 billion. Net claims of $163 billion.
We've given our clients, customers, $163 billion that helps them in any losses that they've had. The salary is $2.9 billion. This is a company that had total sales of $10 million in 1985. $2.9 billion to all our employees for their families. Made cumulative donations, $570 million, since we began our donations program. We pay about $90 million U.S. every year across the system. Pay taxes. I forget sometimes we pay taxes. $8.3 billion of taxes since inception, cumulative, to do business. Grew our book value per share, 18.7%. Our stock price, 19.5%. We developed a strong and fair, friendly culture, which is our key plus, the moat. Final slide. Next decade, we're always talking about the next 10 years. Guiding principles are there. Performance, we're happy with. Demonstrated strengths that you've seen, that Peter highlighted.
Most importantly, we're well-positioned for the future. Much bigger company, able to take big catastrophe losses, CAD 1 billion, CAD 1.25 billion, still have a combined ratio of 95%. Terrific reserving by all our companies. The key, fair and friendly Fairfax culture. Thank you for listening, and I'm going to open it up for questions. Okay, we'll get to questions here for Peter and myself. We'll have one, two, three, four, and five. Please leave if you have to, no problem at all. You can leave at any time. This meeting is for our shareholders, so we're happy to answer any question that you might have. One, two, three, four, and then it goes to Jeff Stacy for number five. We start with number one.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My name is Daniel Gauthier from Ottawa.
Hi, Daniel.
I'm a recent Fairfax company shareholder in Fairfax India as well, and Helios Fairfax Partners, so the Fairfax trifecta. Thank you, Prem and Peter, for a great presentation. Congratulations on a phenomenal 40 years and having the best year once again in Fairfax's history. I would like to make the most of this opportunity to ask you a three-part question. What are you most grateful about in your company track record? As you mentioned in your shareholder letter in your presentation, the fact that book value and share price have historically compounded close to 20% annually, which is phenomenal, and long-term shareholders are sitting on a gain of around 800x since your IPO.Sigma Corporation
The fact that an employee earning $40,000 per year who had participated fully in your employee share purchase program would have accumulated more than 4,000 shares of Fairfax worth $10.7 million at the end of 2025, or the fact that since you began your donations program, you have made donations totaling more than half a billion dollars to numerous charities supporting communities worldwide. You are blessed and you are blessing others. Well done indeed. The second part of my question is regarding your investment strategy. You said that you like to buy a dollar for $50 as a value investor, and the shares of Helios Fairfax Partners ( formerly Fairfax Africa) are currently trading below 50% of book value. Have you considered, for capital deployment purposes, to increase your ownership in Helios?
You've said in your shareholder letter that Eurobank is by far the best investment you've had in 40 years. Kindly, can you please tell us a little bit more about your investment strategy, how you can find and invest in the next Eurobank? Finally, during my younger years, I had the privilege of serving on the board of directors of the Riding Association of former Prime Minister Paul Martin. I'm compelled to ask you this political question on political economy. Where or which countries are you the most bullish on the current economic prospects and investment opportunities? Here at home with Prime Minister Carney, former central banker, who recently achieved a majority government this weekend, is committed to spending billions of dollars for building Canada stronger. Or in the United States with President Donald Trump ushering in a golden age.
Under Prime Minister Modi with the growing prosperity and economic growth in India, or perhaps another region or country in the world that you would like to share.
Daniel, thank you. You've given us enough questions to last the whole meeting.
Forgive me.
First of all, a warm welcome to our shareholder meeting and to become a shareholder. Your first question. What really makes me grateful. We began by wanting to build a good company. Rick Saltzman, who's now with the good Lord, we wanted to build a good company. That's what we are focused on. After 40 years, I'm biased, I think we have a very good company, and we have a great culture. All of these people will talk about that culture with you when you have a moment. We've got a terrific culture across all our companies. That's what I'm really grateful for. Peter, would you add to that? Anything that you want to add?
No, I think that sums it up. The culture, the return, it all comes together.
All the other things that you added about the return and the culture is very important. The culture is the moat. That's why, after I'm gone, Peter's going to be taking over. It'll continue. All our Presidents have the same opinion of culture. I said yesterday at dinnertime, when I said to our shareholders that people want to be good people, and they don't want to fire people left, right, and center. They're sensitive to people and their jobs and their families and stuff. We found that. You can do that and still get 19.5% compounded over 40 years, right? You can be a good company, a good citizen of the world. Second thing that you said within investments, Helios. We look at all of that.
Helios is run by two terrific guys, Tope and Baba, and we are big fans of them, and we'll consider all the possibilities. The third one, Eurobank. The third one is very interesting, and I think I'll ask you, answer your fourth one, and then I'm going to ask Fokion to talk about Eurobank. We have him here, and so we'll ask him to say a few words. When I travel, I'm 75, going to be 76. I've traveled a whole bunch of places. Business-friendly policies work. Countries that, Greece was very socialistic, and then the Prime Minister, who's now serving his second term, became business-friendly. Greece is just flying, right? Good example. India was socialistic for 67 years. 67 years. Killed the country. That's one of the reasons my dad asked me to come to Canada in 1972.
We have to be worried about socialism, and we have to be worried about giving before we earn. Our book is called, "Doing Good by Doing Well." You got to do well. How do we give $90 million for charity if the whole company never made $1 million? You make $4.8 billion, you can give $90 million. We're very focused on that. I'm a big believer in free enterprise, lack of regulation, Daniel. Put the taxes down, give people the freedom. We have the Horatio Alger here. We celebrate success, and Canada's got tons of success from very humble beginnings. I've gone to the United States on the weekend for Horatio Alger in the United States. It's so inspiring to see so many people who've done well, come from very humble beginnings. Canada and the United States have got together for 200 years.
We've been friends, brothers, sisters, all working together. 60% of our business is in the U.S. We've got some of the finest people working in the United States in our company. We think all of these little differences will get sorted out over time. In fact, Mr. John Templeton has said a long time ago, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, he was so frightened about what was happening, and there were so many bad things were happening, he said, and he thought we wouldn't survive, and lo and behold, now we're 40 years since that time. These things will change. This too will pass. You know that expression. Coming to Canada, I'm a big fan of Canada. Canada's a wonderful country, but in Huron University, we created a center for free enterprise, and we really want to push free enterprise across Canada.
Education, podcasts showing how people have come from nothing, and we've got about 35, 36 members on the way to 100 members. You have to hear and see about their journey. We're going to do that. It opens in May. Let me just ask Fokion. Fokion, why don't you give us a little. He's talked about his strategy for three years. He's laid it out publicly. Give him a nice round of applause. We've had a fantastic.
Thank you all, and thank you, Prem, and let me also thank you for your statement that the Eurobank has been by far the best investment that Fairfax had over its 40 years. Obviously, this is a great honor, but a big responsibility for everyone at Eurobank. It is true that we had some tough times, but thanks to the support of Fairfax, your long-term commitment and all the initiatives that the management of Eurobank took, we got really positive results. Indeed, 2025 marked another strong year for Eurobank. If you remember last year at this annual meeting, I said that we commit to a return on equity of about 15%.
Actually, last year we delivered 16% instead of 15%, close to EUR 1.4 billion bottom line, EPS of EUR 0.37, and we are paying a cash dividend, which is increased versus last year by 13%, and we're about to approve a new share buyback program close to EUR 300 million. At the same time, we are further enhancing the business model of the group. We source about 50% of our revenues out of Greece, 35% out of Cyprus, 15% in Bulgaria. Our banking segment is experiencing a very strong growth, with loans increasing by more than 10% in 2025. The wealth management business is also advancing quite well, evidenced by 30% increase in assets under management. Our footprint in life insurance is increasing, thanks to the acquisitions that we have done in Cyprus.
We acquired the largest insurance there, and also the acquisition of the life component of Eurolife in Greece, which is enhancing further our footprint in this country. Now, as you said, we recently presented our three-year plan for the years 2026, 2027, 2028, in which we anticipate a further increase of our return on equity to 17% by 2028. EPS growth about 10% per annum on average for the three-year period. We anticipate to distribute to our shareholders more than 55% of our earnings through cash dividend and also share buybacks. Overall, and without underestimating the fact that we live in a very volatile world, we may experience one of the most serious energy crises of the last decades. I remain very optimistic about the growth prospects of Eurobank across our three countries, Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria, and across all our business segments.
One last point that I would like to share with you. Eurobank is actively promoting the concept, the idea that Greece, and to a greater extent, Cyprus, may act as strategic gateways for Indian companies that would like to expand their businesses, their products, their services across the EU. In this context, the India office of Eurobank is scheduled to be inaugurated in about one month from today in the presence of the President of the Republic of Cyprus, who is paying an official visit to India around that time. This event is going to precede a number of business announcements, for which I would like to thank Fairfax for its help, and especially Fairfax Digital, the Chairman and the CEO of Fairfax Digital, my friend, Sanjaye Daangal. Thank you for that, and thank you for all the support to this journey.
Thank you very much, Fokion. Great performance. Number two, if you don't mind.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Thank you so much for being a capitalist with compassion and showing us all how it's done when capitalism gets a really bad rep. My name is Ashwin Annamalai, and I come from Waterloo. My question is about the elephant in the room, AI. What is Fairfax AI strategy? I understand it's a decentralized company, but how is it going to affect Fairfax's end customers? How is it going to affect the business itself? How is it going to affect us shareholders? The broader question is, I use AI every day, and I see the capabilities of this technology. It seems straight out of sci-fi. I'm concerned that a lot of people might lose jobs, and this is going to affect the overall economy and societal stability even. Where do you think all of this is going to go? Thank you.
That's a really good question, speaking to the one person who doesn't know too much about technology. I do use AI, and having lived for a long time, and we had the internet and when it came, and there was all sorts of predictions made, and ultimately, the economy somehow generates jobs. I don't see a major if you lose a job here, you get another job elsewhere. We'll answer that question when Brian Young talks about our insurance business. He'll tell you how we are approaching AI. Thank you very much for your question, and welcome to our meeting. Number three.
Hi, Prem. Hi, Peter. Akash from London, England. I found Fairfax only two years ago, unfortunately. Like a lot more here have owned it for much longer, but they say better late than never. It gave me the opportunity to read your shareholder letters for the last few decades, 25 years in a row, like a book.
Wow.
I fell in love with Fairfax and your exclamation marks. My question was
The only thing that Rick Salzberg couldn't take out, my exclamation marks. Everything else he changed.
Yeah, they were lovely, and it was a great experience and gave me a lot of conviction about the future. My question was actually going to be about AI, so now I have to think of something on the fly. I was with Anne talking to the team members yesterday, and it was about the TRS. The question was when you weigh the TRS versus the buyback, when you close the TRS, would you think of buying it back, or would you close it down just by selling it?
We look at all options. Peter, you have looked at the TRS. Why don't you give them a little. Peter's right on top of all of this stuff.
Sure
Yeah. The TRS, really, we treat it as an investment. Back a number of years ago, we bought approximately, I think, $2 million shares. We've taken a bit of the TRS off. It's $1.8 million shares today, but we're always evaluating. It comes into when we look at our capital, and we've been buying back our shares. Like I said, we bought back outright about a million shares last year, just over $1.6 billion. As long as we think the Fairfax shares are undervalued, they'll do well, we'll continue to hold our TRS. As it goes up, we'll take some off for exposure purposes, but we treat it like one of our other investments, essentially.
Thank you.
Akash, one advantage we have is the TRS, as Peter was saying, we can acquire them. We have some time. We can use our money to go and buy shares in the marketplace where there's no option, right, we go and buy them. He looks at both of those things before we, as you said. Thank you very much, Akash. Number four.
Good morning, Peter and Prem. Charles Frischer from Seattle.
Nice to see you.
First of all, I want to thank you.
Nice to see you, Charles. Always good to see you.
Thank you, Prem. I wanted to thank you both and the whole organization for just what's become a fantastic week in Toronto. People are coming now on Sunday and Monday. There's great meetings. You guys organize lovely meetings. It's a fantastic week, the best week in North America as far as I'm concerned for any shareholder meeting.
I'll be paying you, Charles.
I do have a confession to make, Prem. I'm cheating on you. Fairfax is only my second-largest holding. I have another holding in a big spectrum company called NextNav, which will have a resolution shortly, and I promise to put a chunk of those proceeds into Fairfax to make it fully my largest position. I also have gotten to know the folks at Waterous, Adam and his kids, Connor and Riley, very well, and I really like them very much. I was wondering if you had some comments that you'd like to make about Greenfire or Strathcona.
See, Waterous is run by Adam Waterous. Strathcona is the first investment that he made and approximately $100 million that we put in. We've got that back in a dividend. He paid us a $10 dividend. We've got that back. The Strathcona position is worth about $400 million. We got our capital back, and it's $400 million. He's now working on Greenfire. We're investing with him. Just happened. Adam's annual report on Strathcona. For an oil company, it's one of the best annual reports I've read about the oil business. I recommend all of you reading it, and I recommend Strathcona and Greenfire for the long-term investors. Thank you.
Thanks, Prem.
Thank you very much. We go on to number five. Jeff?
Good morning, Prem and Peter. Our first question is about the current insurance environment. The question is as follows. Fairfax had record underwriting profits in 2025 of $1.8 billion and achieved its objective of $1.5 billion. You commented, however, in your shareholder letter that insurance pricing is beginning to soften. I would appreciate hearing any additional comments you might have about the current insurance underwriting environment, and specifically, do you think that Fairfax can still achieve its $1.5 billion underwriting profit target in a soft insurance market?
Thank you, Jeff. Usually Peter will answer this, but we do have Andy Barnard and Brian Young and Lou and Silvy, so we'll ask them that. As Andy makes his way up to speak, let me just say that yesterday I said people ask me, "What is the best acquisition you've made?" And I say the best one is Markel, the first one, because otherwise you're not in the game. I mentioned that. I said the second best was a small little company called Skandia. Why? Because I had to get someone to run Skandia, and I went to New York three times to get Andy Barnard. Ultimately, first time he says, "You got to be kidding me." He said, "First dinner, I'm not going to leave this transatlantic to come and join a one-off company called Skandia." That's how it began.
Second and third, and ultimately, we were fortunate to get him 30 years ago, and he's had a huge impact on Fairfax. In 2011, I said to him, as many of you know, all of the insurance companies report to him, and I think he came here and said at that time, almost 15 years ago, said that he would hope that the insurance business will have the same reputation of being fantastic like the investment business that we run. The investment business did a little less well, and the insurance business has done fabulously well. Andy, over to you. Come on in.
Thank you very much, Prem, for all of that. I'm going to let Brian and the others talk about our current position, the market, our prospects. I thought, as Prem mentioned, I've been in this role now for 15 years, and I thought I'd just give a little brief, broad perspective on how I look back on that. I divide that 15 years, which started in 2011, into two periods. First, 2011 - 2019. I really look back, with the benefit of hindsight, of course. This was a period of preparation. We added, during that period, Allied World and Brit, two very powerful new platforms, capabilities, that really filled out our suite of products. We had Crum & Forster bolstering its capabilities. We had a few small acquisitions we added to what Crum was capable of.
Northbridge, earlier on in that time, had finished its integration, which really positioned it as a much stronger company. Of course, during this time, Odyssey and Zenith flourished during most of that time. A few tough years at the beginning for Zenith, but over the course of time, both those companies were doing very well. Then, of course, we built out that international operation during the latter part of that first period. As Peter mentioned, how significant that has become and what we think that's going to do for us in the future. This was really a period of preparation that brought us up to when we get to 2020, across Fairfax, across our companies, we now had in place excellent leaders. Leaders that were fully aligned with Fairfax culture, that embody the trust, the transparency, the talent, without which our decentralized system could not function.
All that's in place as we roll into 2020. Of course, the big thing at the start of the year was the pandemic. A lot of companies heading for the hills. A lot of uncertainty. Plus, we had a very attractive hard market that had already been underway and was gathering force, and I think the pandemic just accelerated. We were, at that time, in just a unique position because of our structure, our capability, our leadership, to thrive. Thrive we did. Over the next years, as we go into the second period, 2020 up through 2025. Peter talked about some of this. He was going back to 2017, but if I look from 2020, we virtually doubled our premium volume. Almost all of that was organic, with the one exception of GIG.
The vast majority of that growth was all organic, driven by our companies, by their leaderships, by their management teams. More importantly than that, our underwriting profit over that period more than quadrupled. This is where we really came into our heyday. Today, to 2026, we're recognized as an underwriting powerhouse in the industry by the marketplace, by the rating agencies. We had huge increases in our ratings over the last year and a half. Again, looking back on it all over that 15 years with the benefit of hindsight, we just positioned ourselves so favorably to really take off when the market conditions were supportive of that strategy. I believe that what we built is built to last.
It is built to withstand the pressures of the market cycle. That those who follow the industry, you know that we're in a softening cycle. Things become more challenging, but we're very confident about our capabilities, about our management's abilities to navigate through some more challenging times, and to sustain superior performance as we go off into the future from here. I personally have been in this industry now for close to 50 years. I've been at Fairfax for 30 years. I'm not going anywhere quite yet. However, my good friend and partner of the last 36 years, Brian Young, is taking on a larger and larger share of the oversight responsibilities in Fairfax. Those of you who have followed Odyssey, particularly from the time Brian took the helm in 2011, it's very clear that Brian is someone that knows how to make money in this business.
I think our future is very bright as we move forward from here. Let me turn the microphone over to my friend, Brian Young.
Brian Young. A round of applause.
Thank you, Andy. I learned some big news a few minutes ago. Andy told me that he is going to be a grandfather for the third time. Big hand to Andy. I will cover the AI question and the current market environment, our ability to generate an underwriting profit in the current environment. First, just highlights for 2025. As Peter mentioned, actually $1.82 billion of underwriting profit in 2025. Fractionally higher than $1.79 billion in 2024. Combined ratio of 93%. Embedded in that was 4.8 points of CAT loss. The $1.2 billion that Peter mentioned, the biggest being the California wildfires in Q1. Within the 93%, we benefited from 2.9 points of favorable reserve development. It's important to note that Fairfax has had 19 consecutive years of favorable reserve development. For the last two decades, our reserves have been a store of value.
As you all know, we are really focused, all of our companies are focused on discipline underwriting, and strong reserving. Prudent reserving is really foundational to discipline underwriting. We have more than 30 operating companies. Nearly all of them equal or exceeded expectations from an underwriting perspective in 2025. The small number that didn't, we weren't expecting them to make underwriting profits given the market circumstances that they faced. There were no negative surprises in really any of our companies. I'd like to highlight a few standout performers. Focus first on the big companies and let's start with the most recent recipient of the Athappan Award, Allied World, our largest company, generating record underwriting profits of $546 million. A fantastic result. Congratulations, Lou, and to the team. I'm going to let Lou come up and tell us what the secret sauce is that's made Allied so successful.
The second company I'd like to highlight, last year's recipient of the Athappan Award, Northbridge. Silvy's team delivered the lowest combined ratio, 88.3%, of all our big companies. In the last four out of five years, Northbridge has delivered a combined ratio below 90%, and Silvy come up after Lou and give us an update on Northbridge. Turning to the international side, we generated $220 million of underwriting profit, more than double that we generated in 2024. Our standout performers, Colonnade, Bryte, Singapore Re, all generated record underwriting profits. Singapore Re, headed by Philippe Mallier, had not only the lowest combined ratio on the international side, they had the lowest combined ratio of all of our companies at 77%. Well done, Philippe. Our premiums, $33.3 billion. It's slowing down. The market is getting more challenging, no doubt. We have to exercise more discipline.
We have to be more selective in the risks that we take. We have to focus on our line size deployment. We still think there's opportunity out there in the market. The sectors of the business that are under the most pressure are the ones that have generated the most profit. Yes, the margins are shrinking, but we still think they're margins. When the margins are not there, when that margin of safety we need to take on the volatility of insurance, then we're going to scale back. There's no pressure on any of our companies to write for profit, and I've experienced that at Odyssey, working there for 28 years, leading it for 14. Never did I or any of our people have any pressure to write for top line.
On the question of AI, it's important in our decentralized structure, innovation comes from the ground. It can't be forced from the top down. We've got +30 wonderful businesses. Everyone is focused. AI may well be very transformative. We're not at the cutting edge, and we don't really want to be in the cutting edge. We're where we think we need to be, and in the pack with the rest of the insurance industry. To understand and take advantage of the innovative things that we're doing at the company level, we formed an AI working group across the Fairfax organization, and we have more than 75 people participating in the working group. We have more than 100 use cases that we've developed.
We have a SharePoint site, so if we develop a use case in a company in a certain part of the world, we can share that with the other companies through the forum, through the SharePoint site. In terms of the AI use cases, most of them have really been focused on improving process. Doing things faster and smarter. Trying to underwrite more business efficiently through the use of AI. Using AI to inform our underwriting decisions. Really, I would say if you were to look at it, and Mark Ade has used the phrase, I think it's great, "Does AI bang the cash register? Does it lower your loss ratio?
Does it lower your expense ratio?" I would say right now it really focuses more on we're not banging the cash register as yet, other than the fact with AI, we are able to underwrite more business using the tool than previously. Lowering the loss ratio, lowering the expense ratio, in terms of the AI tools that we're using, that's really the focus. I think lastly, it's really important to say, and Prem has emphasized it ad nauseam, that AI will not cost us any jobs. We don't believe in laying off employees, period, and that includes AI. It may result, if AI allows us to operate more efficiently, then maybe the rate of growth in our employee count will slow down, which will help the expense ratio, but it won't come at the expense of people. Thank you. Maybe now I can turn it over to Lou.
Give Brian Young a nice round of applause. Brian Young.
Thank you, Brian. Great to see everybody. It's good to see so many people I only get to see once a year and talk about our businesses here at Fairfax and at Allied. It's also not every day that I feel like Allied World has won the Stanley Cup. We're really proud of that as well. Brian mentioned our underwriting profit. We did have a record year last year on underwriting profit, but we also had a high-water mark on our net income. I want to recognize the investment group at Fairfax, who does a tremendous job on our portfolio. Having that type of net income really helps our cash flow and everything else. It's really good to see. We grew our company to $7.4 billion last year. Brian talked about the market a bit. It is softening some.
I would say it's getting a little bit more price competitive. For those of you who've been with our industry for a long time, it's not a traditional soft market. We're not bottoming out. Terms and conditions are holding pretty well. Combined ratios don't have so much pressure on them, could still manage the profitability. When you look at that, you say, well, there are opportunities around the world to be able to get some growth. We're not giving up on that because I think there are certainly some opportunities. What I wanted to talk about just for a couple of minutes is what are some of the things that we do to help us manage a cycle?
Because we feel like we've built a company that could perform in all segments of the cycle, and in order for that to happen, we have to execute on many strategies every single day. The company has to be structured in a way to give us that ability. There are a couple things in there, and I think the first thing to talk about is the structure of having a very flat organization. I think you see that elsewhere in Fairfax. At Allied, we have a very flat organization. We don't have many layers, so strategies and communication moves quickly. This gives us the opportunity to move fast in different marketplaces around the world. As the markets change, we can change strategies, we can execute on those strategies.
Our underwriters at the desk, since there's not lots of layers, they don't have to get multiple sign-offs to do their job to be able to make a decision. We run with the mantra of hire really great people, give them the authority and accountability to be able to get the job done. Additionally, we have over 40 products. We are in 29 offices around the world, and that's growing. We're expanding our presence around the world geographically, which really gives us lots of diversity. The product diversity that we have, and we're in 11 countries, and we're in four continents, so the earnings stream is very diverse. When we have that type of diverse earnings stream, it really limits earnings volatility.
When the market starts to get a little bit tougher, it's really helpful to have different earnings streams because you may have to slow some down. If you're not getting the marketplace that you like in a certain product or a certain country, you're going to have to slow that down, but maybe there's an opportunity someplace else. The diverse earnings stream is really very helpful, and I think you see that throughout Fairfax as well. The third thing that I would touch on is underwriting discipline. Underwriting discipline helps in every marketplace, whether it's a hard market, soft market, in the middle. It's extremely important. It runs through every Fairfax company. It's part of the culture of Fairfax. Now, what does that mean, really? Our underwriters understand rate adequacy.
They understand when they're negotiating a deal, where that rate crosses a line to not being enough for the exposure that they're taking on. When we run into that situation, we have the ability to say no, which we say no a lot more than we say yes. What we really prefer to do is to say, "No, we don't like the deal that way, but we do like it this other way." We'll put a proposal out that works for us and we hope works for the client. We've been able to do business like that and sell deals like that fairly often, even in this marketplace when things are getting just a little bit softer. That's been very helpful.
Now, nothing works without great people, and every year I come up here and I think I talk about how great the people are at Allied. We've had people with us for a very long period of time. They've seen all different cycles, so they understand how to manage in the different cycles and through the different cycles. We have a very low attrition rate at the company. Our people are really the key to making all the strategies work. For us, we're going to continue to do the things that we're good at. As the market softens some, we're going to limit our mistakes so that when the market does get to a better place, we can do all the things that Andy talked about that we did a couple of years ago and not have any distractions. Thank you very much, everybody.
Have a great day.
Thank you, Lou. Come on, Silvy.
Good morning, everyone. First, I'll start with a little confession to Lou. Northbridge employees wanted to do a Rory McIlroy repeat. We are happy that Allied World has won the cup this year. A little perspective on Canada. Just so Northbridge Financial represents the Canadian insurance operations for Fairfax, $3.4 billion in revenue, and we're the third-largest commercial insurer in Canada. We have a very good position, may be a smaller fish at the Fairfax, but a bigger fish in this country. Market conditions. What happened in 2025, as Lou said, the price competition really started to ramp up. We're starting to see competitors trying to buy business. Sorry, I apologize for being a broken record, but once again, we are not pressured to write premium at a loss. With that, in 2025, our employees did the right thing.
They remained disciplined, not only in underwriting, but claims and expense management. Equally important is we doubled down on really focusing on customer loyalty, customer service, and customer safety. Not only are we there when things go wrong, but we're trying to help our customers have safer operations. With that, we did not grow in 2025. However, we did have our record year, as Brian noted. With that, 2026, it looks like the price competition continues, and we will manage accordingly. Along with just being disciplined, we're also looking at building areas where we can grow when it's the right time to grow. For instance, increasing our lines on renewable energy in Canada. Just manage the market and then be ready to go when it's time. Just one little comment.
We talked about the culture and of course, many times, and the beautiful word of being empowered, not just at the president level, but throughout the company. I just wanted to share with you that our employees are like you. They're shareholders. Over 70% of our employees at Northbridge are shareholders. Not only are they empowered, but they're owners and doing the right thing. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Silvy. Hey, Peter, anything to add? Final words on the insurance industry.
Sure. Just two quick things, Prem. I mentioned in my remarks that we write CAD 33 billion of premium across the world, and that grew by 2.3% this year. I was looking at, and it's interesting when you look at the international operations and how we benefit from diversification, Bryte in South Africa, they grew 20% this year. Colonnade, 18%, Asia was up 15%, and Polish Re was up 15%. Even though in North America, rates are coming down, we're maybe not growing as much, we have all these opportunities around the world. Then, just secondly, just have to comment that we have two cups in Fairfax. One is the Mr. Athappan Cup, and we also have a hockey game between the Fairfax head office and the Allied group.
Unfortunately, now Allied owns both cups for this year. I have to say it did come into the evaluation process a bit, but we left that aside.
I happen to be the coach of the hockey team in the holding company. We're coming after you, Lou. Okay. We go on to number one. Yeah.
Hello, my name is Angela. I just finished my HBA two-year at Ivey, and I wanted to extend appreciation to Prem for all the support you offer to the institution and with the value investing class. My question is simple. I was wondering if you could speak a little more closely about specific metrics or benchmarks used to hedge against climate-related underwriting exposure. Thank you.
Peter, you want to add that question, Peter?
Sure. No, as we said before, obviously, insurance. We protect people against catastrophes. We write a lot of catastrophe business, and climate is a big part of that. For us, that's what we view as a service we provide our clients, and we take that very seriously. The other side of that is we have to manage our exposures, and I think we talk about that a lot. We have a lot of internal limits we have. We ensure that each one of our companies manage their catastrophe exposure within the capital that they have at their level. They look at total limits exposed. They look at PMLs. They work with their clients to reduce exposure. Then we protect ourselves through reinsurance. Bottom line is, we manage it at the company level. We aggregate it at the Fairfax level.
That's one thing we do do. We look at our total exposure. Today, we look at it like a 1 in 250 PMLs, so that's every 1 in 250 years, what would be your expected loss? Today, that's around $3.4 billion-$3.5 billion. Well within our $4 billion. In the past, would we say our 1 in 250 was manageable within our net earnings. Today, and especially over the last number of years, it is. We're quite comfortable with that. But it's a very important product that we offer to our clients, and we take it very seriously. Thank you for your question.
Thank you for your question, Angela. Just to add to what he says, there's limits in our business. Mainly our exposure comes from reinsurance. We look at those limits, and we make sure that, as Peter was saying, within 15% of the company's shareholder's equity capital. Never forget there's always price. The price of property exposure now CATs coming down. When the price is up, that takes all of those possibilities into account, and that's when we expand, and we have expanded in the past. Price and limits. Thank you for your question. Number two.
Good morning. I'm Paul Durnin from Burlington.
Mike Durnin.
I read in "The Globe and Mail" today an article that disturbed me. Bombardier Recreational Products is taking a $500 million write-down on tariffs, steel, aluminum, copper, and revised totally their 2027 outlook, and the stock price went down quite sharply. Maybe you can't look forward to precise numbers, but I'm scared based on that one alone. How is the future going to unfold for this whole country?
Well, those tariffs are important. We've got two companies. We've got Sleep Country, 40% market share mattresses across Canada. 40% market share. They're getting a lot of stuff from all over the world, but they've been able to get some concessions from the suppliers. Some they pass on. They had record profits in 2025. Lot of tariffs. Another one is Bauer Skates, which is skates and hockey sticks and all. They have 50% market share across the world in that case. We get, again, all sorts of purchases from different countries, tariffs, but they get supplier concessions and pass on some of the costs. Long story short, record profits in Bauer. You're able to navigate as a business. Business just doesn't stand still and says, "The tariffs have gone up. Woe is me." No, you negotiate. You figure out what happens.
That's happening. I speak to a lot of companies in Canada. A lot of companies have done the same thing. We are able to face those tariffs and succeed. You want to add?
Yeah. I want to stretch this out to be broader than just the companies that you are involved in.
Yeah.
Generally all across Canada, I'm concerned about this m atter.
No, I think it's a good concern. The people I talk to who run companies, they've faced these situations before. There's all sorts of hurdles that you face in business. COVID. Imagine COVID when business stopped. Your sales went to zero in many industries, and you had to survive that. These are things that companies have to work out. We're just one example of that. Your concern's valid, and thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Thank you.
Number three.
Hi, Prem. It's Jason from Thunder Bay.
Hi, Jason.
Peter, hi as well. I have to admit, I'm a bit sleepy this morning. Part of that because Brian Blaser was with us until 11:00 P.M. after the dinner.
Oh my goodness.
He was mostly talking about his views on currency debasement, really foreseeing that politicians will continue to inflate away. Debt to GDP in the U.S. is now past the peak of World War II. Maybe you could just give some color on how you see the massive debts every Western government has right now, how we get out of it, and gold as well.
Well, that's one of the reasons we're not gold bugs, but one of the reasons people like gold, the fact that currency debasement's taking place. We really don't have much to add on that. The fact is the huge amount of debt, the fact is that the United States has $2 trillion. The deficit is about 6% of GDP. It's huge. They've got a whole bunch of revenue coming in with the tariffs that most of us don't like, but there's tariffs coming in. We have to wait and see what happens. There's two major problems. One is the markets are high. I talked about Nvidia. Last night at our shareholders' dinner, Nvidia had net income three years ago of $8 billion. That's $8 billion, three years ago. 2025, something like $117 billion. Massive net income. That's not revenue.
It sells at about 33, 34, whatever times earnings. Right? A huge PE on earnings that have skyrocketed. This happened before. This happened in the 2000s with the digital stuff that came in with the network internet companies. For history's sake, Microsoft was $60million in 2000. Three years later, it was down 75%. You couldn't see it. High PE, all of the things that happened here. Now if you go further back, you had Nifty 50 was the same sort of thing. You have one risk is the markets are high. There's lots of individuals in the stock market. Your friends are all in the stock market. They're buying stock, they're trading stock, they're buying options. They're trying to make money in the short term.
The other side is the potential that the United States will be very strong potential that their productivity is going to be very high, that their deficits are going to come down. For example, if the economy in the United States, I think all the projections are based on 1.5% economic growth for 10 years. If it goes by 1% more, that eliminates the deficit. That's how sensitive it is. If the GDP grows by 1% more, so instead of 1.5 - 2.5, the deficit goes. Lots of pluses and minuses. The bottom line is you have to be cautious, very careful, which is what we are, careful because the war in Iran. Anything can happen. That's how we're looking at it, being very cautious. We've got government bonds, 3 years - 4 years. Not 10 years, 3 years - 4 years.
Any of our stock investments are very well-financed and very strong. Your concerns are well taken, and Brian Blaser's been with us for 50 years, and he is someone you should listen to. Thank you for your question, and we go on to number four.
Hi, my name's Ernest Wong from Toronto. I'm a relatively new shareholder, so looking forward to learn more about the culture as I become a longer-term shareholder.
Okay.
I wanted to ask the AI question from an insurance perspective. Fairfax is a meaningful underwriter of cyber insurance, and as we are seeing with developments in AI such as Mythos last week, we are really in uncharted territories. How are these types of events, and AI in general, changing the way Fairfax looks at its cyber exposure in the underwriting business?
You heard Brian talk about it. Cyber's a great example. When we were expanding, the price was way up. Many people didn't want to write the business. We had about three or four companies writing it, and we did very well. Now the competition's coming, and prices are coming down, and we've got less exposure. We're very sensitive about that. Peter, you want to add to it?
Yeah. We have exposure to that in two ways, right? We have the exposure on ourselves being attacked, and we're doing a lot of work on that as well right across the group that we're ensuring that we have best practices in place, 24-hour surveillance, etc.. That's a real focus of Fairfax. Then we do write cyber, as Prem said, it's come down the last number of years and all of our companies are working on it. They manage it through limits, through reinsurance and exclusions. As AI progresses, it's coming quickly, but rest assured they're working on it and it's an industry issue and they're on top of it.
I have a second question. You highlighted that Fairfax's private credit exposure was quite limited. However, many other insurance companies have invested heavily into private credit. Do you view this as a potential issue going down the road?
Definitely do anything that is everybody tries it .Private credit has gone through the roof. Most of this private credit is for PE firms. A private equity firm buys a company, leverages maybe 7, 8 times to equity, and then sends something else to private credit. Private credit that's helping finance this. It's not financing a company like ours, for example. There's a lot of risk and the ratings are from companies that are very new and perhaps you don't get S&P rating this stuff. I've seen it before. Private credit, private equity, all of those you have to be careful about. It's another risk in the marketplace, private credit. These risks are such, like we saw in the mortgage business, it's like a fire. They go right through. We stay away from that. Basically outside private credit, we have no exposure.
Most of our, I told you, government bonds, the spreads are very narrow. It's government bonds. If you have any bonds that are corporate bonds, it's one or two years in duration. Very good credit that we are sure we'll get our bonds. Because if interest rates go up, and you have corporate bonds, then you can come down. This is another thing that could affect the life insurance companies particularly, but also property casualty companies. All of these are possibilities that could change the market. The market's going down right now, property casualty market. If the capital shrinks because they've got private credit or something else and their capital shrinks, then of course the market can turn. For us right now, as Brian has said and Andy has said, we got to be very careful and that's what we are, very disciplined.
Thank you for the question. Jeff, number five.
Our next question is about capital allocation. Can you discuss the decision process for determining the size of the annual dividend versus making stock repurchases or holding the capital for other purposes?
Yeah, that's a good question. We don't have any formula. We give a dividend, which I know for a lot of our shareholders is taxable. It used to be $1, went to $2, $5, and $10, and now it's $15. $15 is less than 10% of our net income, and we're comfortable with that, less than 10%. Financial soundness, like Peter said, financial soundness, number one, we are focused on that, particularly for some of the things that might happen in the economy. After that, we want to buy back our shares. If you look at the float of our company or gross premium and you look at the 40 years and the growth in our premium, if you look at the growth rate up here, it's in the annual report, but 15%, 16%, 17%.
In the last five years it might be only 10% or 12%. Then you look at growth per share in gross premiums, per share, the fact that we've dropped the shares that Peter was saying, it's pretty close. Like our per share growth in the float or gross premium certainly goes up to 15%, 16%, 17%, very close to the absolute gross premium growth or the float. That's what per share does. We are very focused on per share float and growth and premiums and all of the other things, per share. It's not the absolute number that will count, it's per share. That's what'll affect your share price over time. That's what we look at. Then we look at the other things that come, Jeff, are ones that we don't forecast. It just comes along.
After 40 years, companies want to be partners with us. They're looking to be partners with us, and you won't believe the number of opportunities we get, and quite often we have to say no because the price is high or whatever. But we get some very good opportunities to partner with good companies and that's a big advantage. That's what happens over time. Over 40 years, you get that if you've treated your partners well, and we have. Jeff, thank you very much. Number one.
Good afternoon, Chair. I was able to read "The Fairfax Way" by David Thomas. Phenomenal book, would recommend it to anyone. I'm slightly disappointed that it's on sale now. I paid full price for the hardcover. I could have just bought the Kindle version.
Man, that loss.
So-
I learned a lot about Fairfax from that book. One of the things that was really special was that the book said you were really candid about Fairfax's price. You were open and honest about whether the company was undervalued, whether it was overvalued. You're one of the best capital allocators in this country and maybe even in the world. Right now, what is the intrinsic value of Fairfax? Given all the market conditions, concerns about bubbles, is Fairfax undervalued, fairly valued, or overvalued? Basically, I'm trying to make some money here, Mr. Chair.
You want to do it in a week. No, we give you all the information. It used to be book value was a great measure, but a lot of our things, Peter talked about $4 billion that's not in our balance sheet. A lot of our companies are worth a lot more than book value. The intrinsic value is much higher. For 40 years, we've never told you what intrinsic value is. That's the work you've got to do, and you compare us to everyone else. The single biggest thing you can do as an investor is to invest in our company if you want to, but take a long-term view. Don't look at it every 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, go up and down, get excited, and you want to sell some and then buy some.
Look at it over the long term, because compounding takes place over time. That's the suggestion I'll make for you. You've already had a good start reading David Thomas' book. Thank you for your question. Number two.
Hello, Mr. Watsa. My name is Gia. I am a individual investor from Toronto. I am a long-term follower of Fairfax, but a recent shareholder.
Toronto.
I have a question that might contradict with your annual letter. The company BlackBerry, they've released earnings last week.
I knew you're getting me back to BlackBerry.
They released earnings last week. Very impressive.
Yeah.
They're Adjusted EBITDA positive. I know you don't like Adjusted EBITDA, but they're cash flow positive, and they're buying back shares. That's been a trend over the past three quarters as well. My question is, do you think this could be yet another example of patience paying off for Fairfax? Perhaps we see a slide on BlackBerry in a few years.
I hope it is.
I have a quick follow-up, and this is related to the overall SaaS sector. We see a much more adjustment in the valuation metrics for all the Software as a Service company. Mr. Watsa, as a value investor, do you think now is the right time to start evaluating some of the opportunities in this space?
We've looked at it and ourselves, we haven't bought any. I think I know a lot of them have come down quite a bit. We'll consider. We never talk about what we're going to buy. You'd expect us not to. We look at all the possibilities and I gave you the example of Under Armour, $50 million-$5 million. That got our attention. I don't think that's happened yet in some of the companies you're talking about. Thank you for your question.
Thank you.
Thank you. Number three.
Hi, I'm Peter Stern from Toronto. One comment on AI. I've got a couple of decades in IT experience. One thing, if we have any exposure to AI companies, we should pay attention to the intellectual property lawsuits that some of these AI companies are being exposed to. That's something that could become a big problem for these AI companies as I foresee it. My experience is too much garbage in and garbage out with AI, in my opinion. Now, completely separate subject. The Middle East situation, how do you see that playing out? And the infrastructure that Iran is bombing, what is our exposure there? And do you see any opportunities as a result of a bad situation right now, potentially getting better eventually, hopefully?
That's a very good question. We have something called GIG and GIG Gulf, and in total they are approximately $3 billion in premium. First worry for us was our people, and I'm happy to tell you we've looked at all our people, and they're all safe. With Ukraine, we had the experience of how to protect our people, and we protected them really well. That's point number one. Point number two, the company continues to do very well. Our losses are very small and far between. War risk is not covered. If there's war, there's war exclusions. Unless you have a specific exposure to war, then you get the premium. All in all, we think we're in a very good position. Peter?
Yeah, on the insurance side really the losses will come through the marine business, aviation, political risk. We're going to have some losses on that, but we're not big players in those lines of business. We're only six weeks into this war, so it's hard to tell where it goes from here. We're paying close attention to it. We'll monitor our risks. That's actually something we're really good at, that when there's a risk out there, as a group, we look at it, study it, see ways, first protect ourselves, then is there any way that we can take advantage of it. As of right now there'll be very little effect on our first quarter earnings.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Number four.
Hi. My name's Aaron, and I am from Toronto. Relatively recent shareholder, but long time fan. Throughout this meeting and in general analysis of Fairfax, to me, it seems that the company's success is a product of both the company's structure in terms of both financial values, governance, and the company's ability to execute well. As business landscapes evolve due to various factors like tariffs or AI or any other sorts of factors, how do you think about any potential change in decision-making processes at Fairfax? Would there ever be a set of circumstances where you would think that this company should take a more centralized approach? Or do you think the decentralized approach is one that should stay permanently?
That's a really good question because this is 40 years. We've gone through all sorts of problems, and we think about that when we have faced a problem in one of our insurance company. Used to be Markel Insurance Company years ago, and we could easily have said, "You know what? We're going to centralize it." We didn't. Then we had TIG with another big one. A big plus was we never changed the structure. All of these years, we've never changed the structure. What you see is what Andy and Brian and all our company presidents have said about the empowerment. It's unbelievable how that works. Last year, we had a thing on decentralization.
Andy, myself, Peter, we put it all together and we said, "Sometime long after I'm gone, some bright wizard will come," perhaps like you're a young man, "and say, 'Why don't you centralize all this? You'll save money here, here, and you save $1 billion.'" That's what we could save. What you lose is what you can't quantify. The culture between each company, the empowerment that they get, the fact that many of them will leave, and you see it in the insurance business and you see it in other companies. That, in our minds, will never change. That's why we put it in so that 10 years from now, someone comes with that idea, where it says 2024 annual report. Decentralization works. Our principles will never change. Peter, would you add to that?
First of all, I'm a huge fan of decentralization as well, and I see the benefits of it. Just as an example, if you go back to 2019, start of the hard market, we were writing maybe $15 billion-$16 billion of premium. The hard market hit, and if we were writing as a group $16 billion, we wouldn't have been able to expand like we did. Over the next 3 years - 4 years, we grew the premium by 16%-17% per year because there were 26 companies writing $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion on the ground, nimble, ready to react, and they were able to double their premium. If that was one group at the holding company, we wouldn't have done it.
I think over that time period, if you look at all the property casualty groups or companies, we grew the most out of anyone and took advantage of that. That is just one example. There's many others.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much. That is a very good question. We go to number five.
The next question is about Fairfax's banking investments. With increasing exposure to banking through Eurobank, CIB, and CSB Bank, can you comment about how you think about and manage banking sector risk?
Yeah. The credit risk is the biggest risk that you have in banking. One of the keys is also not to have any incentive for the top line, and our investments would have none of that. Eurobank is a great example. Terrific bank, very private. I say private. When I first met them, I said, "How are you compared to the other three or four banks?" They said, "We're a private bank." I said, "What do you mean a private bank?" He says, "Everyone comes at 9:00 A.M., we come at 8:00 A.M., and everyone leaves at 4:00 P.M. or 5:00 P.M., and we leave at 6:00 P.M., 7:00 P.M., 8:00 P.M." I said, "Okay, I understand." Hardworking group of people who work for a long time. Brian Porter mentioned to me that the key is the ability to get the deposits. Deposits are like our float.
All our banks have that exposure and have that strength. We like it. You can see Fokion talking about 15%-17% and paying back 50%-55% of the profit through dividends and buybacks. It's a big strength for us and it's worked out very well. Jeff. Continues to work out very well. Number one.
Thank you. Ian Sanderson from Calgary. I've been with you guys as a shareholder since 2003. Question for Peter.
22 years.
That's a long time.
A long time.
A little bumpy.
Very good.
Question for Peter. I know that Prem says he has no plans to retire anytime soon, but supposing he did, and you could only talk to him, say, once a week on Saturday mornings, what would you still need to consult with him on, and what types of questions would you ask him?
Well, I guess first of all, yeah, like you said, he's not going anywhere, and we're thankful for that. My biggest issue is keeping up with Prem. That's the hardest part of my job. No, it's been great. The company has been set up. I've been here for 28 years. We have our guiding principles that we follow. Those will never change. We're in very good alignment on where we want the company to go forward. I do talk to him most Saturday mornings, by the way.
Really look forward to that and the guidance. The guidance obviously is what Prem makes very good decisions. He makes decisions very quickly, and that's something that I respect greatly. Those may be a couple things.
Whenever I talk to Peter, 99.9% the same thing. We talk all the time. Peter is basically, in the company, everyone reports into Peter. Slowly but steadily, we are working that through. All the people are reporting to Peter. The investment side comes into Peter. He knows about what's happening on both sides, and like I try to do. It's working very well. 22 years is terrific, and I hope you've held all your shares. That's terrific. I've met some really big shareholders who've got very wealthy, and I hope that's the same experience you have. Thank you for your question, number one. No one at number two? We go to number three.
Hi, Prem, Peter. Akash again. When studying Fairfax, I was looking at other similar great companies like Berkshire and Markel. One thing that is different is the investment leverage, which is sort of the investment assets by equity, where Fairfax is around 3:1, Markel maybe 2:1, and Berkshire 1:1. They all have different amounts of equity in their portfolio, equity holding. I just wanted to get your sense of what are the puts and takes of operating with that leverage. Maybe a higher leverage, which obviously provides for a higher ROE. But we also know there's no free lunch in finance. Just a separate question, as a big tennis fan myself, I would love to know, Prem, who's your favorite tennis player?
Djokovic.
Same. Yeah, great.
The other question was just on investment leverage.
Yeah.
Obviously, we've had an outstanding track record on the investment side. As I pointed out in our slides, one of the biggest things how Hamblin Watsa has outperformed the market is protecting on the downside. As you said, in 1987, we made money. We didn't lose money. 2008, 2009, we actually made money while the most of the industry lost money. That investment leverage is very important. It's attractive to us. As long as we continue to invest with a long-term value approach, with preserving capital, I think we have no problems with the leverage, and it's been a big part of growing our book value over time.
Well said, Peter. Akash, remember, if we hadn't bought, how many? 28 million - 21 million, 7 million shares, our leverage would be low. We're buying it because the shares are cheap, not because we're trying to get the leverage up to three times. The stock is at above its intrinsic value. For example, we're not going to buy. Leverage will start coming down. Now, we will look back at these shares that we bought last year and the year before and in the first quarter, you're going to look back and say, "Thank God they did that." Always, as he said, with our financial position very sound. Thank you for that question. We'll go on to my man. Is that Alan Chen?
Yes. Unfortunately.
How long have you been a shareholder, Alan?
Only 28 years.
28 years. Give him a nice round of applause. He's a young man, and he doesn't have to work.
I have two questions. One is for Prem, another one's for Peter. Prem, my son wants to be a filmmaker. When are you going to increase the dividend to...
I don't think you need that, Alan.
Second question for Peter. Since you're in the insurance business, how can you ensure that the stock price will be $5,000 within a year? Thank you.
Thank you.
That might be it.
It was more of a comment than a question.
I thought you wanted an answer. I was waiting to hear what Peter was going to say. Hey, so it's pretty well. Our timing is good. 12 o'clock. You got any question there, Jeff, the last question?
There actually is one last question here that's come in just in the last few minutes online. Question is as follows: You've had exceptional growth in float at Fairfax. At what scale do you believe it becomes difficult to earn the required return on this float, and how do you adapt your investment strategy accordingly?
See, that's another very good question. Smaller amounts of money are easier to manage than large amounts of money. In the insurance business, you have a limit as to how much you can put into stocks. Out of that $75 billion portfolio, only about $23 billion-$24 billion, something like that, is in common shares and in holdings of companies. That $23 billion-$24 billion, and you look at the world, we think we still have lots of opportunity. We have to be careful how we choose and that type of thing. We're big fans of India. India's got fantastic opportunity because it's growing from a developing country into a developed country over the next decades. We really want to take a moment to thank you all for coming. We look forward to having a little bite with you in the foyer.
Thanks for all the people who helped put this meeting together. It takes a lot of time and effort. Thank you very much.
Very well done, boy.