Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Assurant, Inc. annual meeting. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Elaine Rosen. Ma'am, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning. I'm Elaine Rosen, chair of the board of directors of Assurant Inc. Thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to be able to host our virtual annual meeting with stockholders attending via the web portal. As this is our first virtual annual meeting, we ask that you please refer to the rules of procedure, which are available under the Materials section of the web portal. We will conduct the business portion of our meeting first and answer questions at the end of the meeting. Though we may not be able to answer every question, we will do our best to provide a response to as many as is possible. It is now shortly after 9:00 A.M. Eastern Time on May 7th, 2020, and this meeting is formally called to order. Let me begin by introducing two of the other speakers today.
Joining me on the line is Alan Colberg, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director, and Mariana Wisk, Vice President, Corporate Counsel, and interim Secretary of the company. The other directors with us on the line today are Paget Alves, Juan Cento, Harriet Edelman, Lawrence Jackson, Jean-Paul Montupet, Debra Perry, Ognjen Redzic, Paul Reilly, and Bob Stein.
The entire management committee and certain members of our senior management are also on the line today, including Mike Campbell, Executive Vice President and President Global Housing, Greg DeChurch, Senior Vice President, co-interim General Counsel, Keith Demmings, Executive Vice President and President Global Lifestyle, Richard Dziadzio, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Bob Lonergan, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Risk Officer, Francesca Luthi, Executive Vice President, Chief Communication and Marketing Officer, Kathy McDonald, Executive Vice President and President Global Specialty, Keith Meier, Executive Vice President and President International, Gene Mergelmeyer, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, Jay Rosenblum, Senior Vice President, co-interim General Counsel, Tammy Schultz, Executive Vice President and President Global Preneed, and Robyn Price Stonehill, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer.
I would also like to introduce Todd Morrison of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, the company's independent registered public accounting firm, and Chris Woods of American Election Services, LLC, who will serve as the inspector of elections. Our order of business this morning will be to present the motions to be considered, collect the votes, and then receive a report from the inspector of elections as to the results. Immediately following the adjournment of the business portion of the meeting, Alan Colberg will make a few closing comments and welcome any questions you have submitted in the field provided in the web portal. This brings us to the determination of a quorum. The interim secretary has received proof by affidavit that the notice of annual meeting and proxy statement has been delivered to every holder of record of common stock of the company as of the close of business on March 13, 2020.
The bylaws provide that the presence in person or by proxy of stockholders entitled to vote a majority of the shares of common stock outstanding on the record date constitutes a quorum. The inspector of elections is in charge of determining the proxies and stockholders present. Mr. Woods, do we have a quorum?
Yes, we do. A majority of the votes entitled to be cast as of the record date, March 13th, 2020, is represented at this meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Woods. I'll ask Ms. Wisk to read the agenda for the meeting at this time.
There are three motions to be voted on by the stockholders. The first motion is for the election of the director nominees named in the proxy statement to serve on the board of directors until the 2021 annual meeting. The second motion is for the ratification of the Audit Committee's appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020. The third motion is for a non-binding advisory vote regarding the 2019 compensation of the company's named executive officers. These three motions have been properly brought before the meeting. Under the bylaws, no one else can be nominated as a director, and no other proposals can be made.
Thank you, Ms. Wisk. I will now call for a vote. The polls are now open. Any stockholder who hasn't yet voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking on the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions therein. Stockholders who have sent in proxies or voted via telephone or internet and do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. I will now pause for a moment. I now declare the polls closed. I'll now ask the Inspector of Elections to report on the vote.
Mrs. Rosen, Proposals One, two, and three have been approved by shareholders.
Thank you, Mr. Woods. That completes our formal business for today. The 2020 annual meeting of stockholders is now adjourned. Before turning to Alan, I'd like to make some brief remarks. First, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge Director Charles "Bud" Koch's recent retirement from the board of directors and express our gratitude for the dedicated service he has provided to Assurant for nearly 15 years, particularly during his longtime chairmanship of our finance and investment committee. We have learned much from him, and he will be greatly missed as a director and as a friend. Bud, we wish you and your family all the best. Second, I'd like to recognize Assurant's employees and management for their extraordinary response to the COVID-19 crisis.
We have, together as a global organization, made the best choices we can in the face of this uncertainty with an unwavering commitment toward the safety and wellbeing of all our employees while quickly adapting our operations to deliver exceptional service to our clients and their customers. I speak for the entire board of directors of Assurant when I say we are very, very proud of that, and thank you. I'll now turn things over to Alan for some closing comments, and thank you for attending our meeting today.
Thanks, Elaine. Good morning, and welcome fellow shareholders to our first ever virtual shareholders meeting. This is just one of the many ways in which COVID-19 has profoundly changed the world we live in. Throughout our history, we've proudly lived our core values, common sense, common decency, uncommon thinking, and uncommon results. Today more than ever, they not only matter, but carry added meaning. Common sense in doing our part within society to stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus, common decency in how we support our employees and each other during these challenging times, uncommon thinking in supporting our customers who need us more than ever as we help them navigate through new challenges, and uncommon results in quickly activating our business continuity plans to safeguard our employees and protect our operations.
During the COVID-19 crisis, we rallied together as a global organization and evolved as an enterprise to make the best choices we can in the face of uncertainty, always with the focus on safeguarding the wellbeing of our employees, being there to deliver exceptional service for our customers, and doing our part to have an impact on our local communities. I want to thank our leadership team and our over 14,000 employees for their incredible response to the challenges presented by COVID-19 and their steadfast dedication to our customers during these uncertain times. Earlier this week, we reported our first quarter 2020 results, which were strong and a testament to the unwavering focus of our employees and our strong, profitable growth momentum across our company pre-crisis.
Taking a look back at 2019, we delivered on the financial commitments we set at the beginning of the year as we grew operating earnings, excluding catastrophes, by 11%, and operating earnings per diluted share, excluding catastrophes, by 6%. After adjusting for certain non-recurring items, net operating income increased by 15% and earnings per share grew 10%, which was at the high end of our expectations. In addition, we raised our common stock dividend for the 15th consecutive year since our IPO, and we returned $426 million to our shareholders. 2019 was truly a strong year for Assurant. We added to and deepened our relationships with many leading global brands. We delivered superior value for our end consumers, we also invested in and strengthened our team globally. All of this helped us generate a more diversified base of earnings from which we expect to drive long-term profitable growth.
Throughout the course of 2019, we reached several significant milestones. A few highlights from the year include for Global Lifestyle, a record year as we increased earnings 37% to $409 million. Mobile programs added over the past several years were the major driver of growth, where we now protect about 54 million subscribers, an increase of 15% year-over-year. We continued to invest in capabilities and further enhance the customer experience as evidenced through our acquisition of CPR Cell Phone Repair, a leading provider of local device repair services. Our international operations had a year of very strong growth across multiple countries led by our partnership with KDDI in Japan. In Global Automotive, we completed the integration of The Warranty Group and delivered on our commitment of $60 million pre-tax synergies, and we continued to make gains by growing our covered vehicles by 6% to now 47 million.
In Global Housing, we continued to expand our fee-based capital light services and Multifamily Housing where renters policies grew 10% to $2.2 million. We renewed 16 clients in lender-placed, which underscores our superior offerings and capabilities. In Global Preneed, we continued to build on our strong long-term partnership with SCI while growing our final expense business with new distribution partners. This has allowed us to create a more profitable sales mix as we continue to generate strong cash flows. Another significant accomplishment was the progress we made to advance our commitment across a variety of environmental, social, and governance topics that are critical to the execution of our strategy. In February of this year, we published our second annual social responsibility report for Assurant.
As a purpose-driven company, we enhanced ESG tracking and disclosure, including establishing guiding principles for each pillar, forming a governing oversight board to help track and monitor our progress, rolling out an ESG dashboard that now tracks 50+ key metrics related to 12 ESG topics, increasing information around our catastrophe reinsurance program, including disclosures around our multi-year, multi-event coverage, our lowered per-event retention, and our modeling. Finally, we're strengthening our commitment to data privacy and protection. Moving to our board of directors, with the appointment of Paget Alves, an experienced Director and retired Chief Sales Officer at Sprint Corporation, and Ognjen Redzic, the Chief Digital Officer and Vice President of Caterpillar Inc., with responsibility for Cat Digital, we've continued to diversify our board by bringing in new expertise that is very relevant to our business.
As mentioned on our first quarter earnings call, while we believe the long-term fundamentals and resiliency of our business remain strong, we suspended our 2020 financial outlook until we have additional clarity into COVID-19's duration and impact on the broader economy. We continue to feel that our capital position, strong balance sheet, and resilient mix of businesses positions Assurant very well relative to this challenging environment. We are confident we'll be an even stronger Assurant when this crisis is behind us. Thank you, and at this time, I'm happy to take any questions.
Thank you. This is Mariana Wisk. We have received three questions so far. The first question is, how has COVID-19 impacted the business, and what are your thoughts going forward?
Great, Mariana, and thank you for the question. I think what I would say is a couple of things. First of all, I'm really proud of how our employees and our leaders have responded to this crisis. We moved very aggressively and quickly to work from home for the employees where we could do that. For those employees who need to remain in the office providing essential services, we've done extensive work on safeguarding and protecting those employees as best we can. I'm also proud of the way we're making a difference. We've been able to maintain service levels pretty much without missing a beat during this crisis, and it's allowed us actually to really deepen and strengthen some of our critical client relationships.
With that said, obviously there are impacts on our business. We did suspend our outlook given we don't know and nobody knows how long this might last and what the duration might be and some of the things that might happen. With that said, we entered the crisis very strong. I'm confident we'll come out of it the other side. As we think about long-term, our expectations that we can deliver above-market profitable growth and drive shareholder value through disciplined capital management, none of that has really changed when we come through the other side of this crisis. We have a very good installed customer base across businesses like Connected Living, Global Automotive, Multifamily Housing. We have a counter-cyclical business in lender-placed homeowners. All of that positions us well to weather this extraordinary crisis. Mariana, next question.
We've received two additional questions from Howard Tenenbaum, who states that he hopes our CEO, Mr. Colberg, Chair, Ms. Rosen, board, and employees remain well health-wise. The first question is the recently acquired AFAS. He presumes this deal was in motion some time ago. Had you had insight into the current environment of the pandemic, would you have had a different strategy in terms of preserving cash?
First of all, Howard, thank you for your well wishes, and I hope you and your family and all of our shareholders are doing well in this crisis. We've had a long history with American Financial Automotive Services, or AFAS, and the discussions around our merging with them have been ongoing for quite a while. I don't think we would have changed the decision. This is a very good business that is extremely complementary to our acquisition of The Warranty Group. We now have a market-leading capability and platform that we can add this important new customer, now a partner of ours, into. We believe it's an extraordinarily attractive long-term deal for our shareholders and will help us drive further profitable growth in automotive. No, I don't think we would approach it any differently. We are being conservative about what I mentioned yesterday on the earnings call.
We're probably not going to do any other significant M&A during the crisis. We felt this was such a unique situation and such a strong company with really differentiated capabilities that it was important to continue to move forward because we are going to come out the other side of this crisis at some point.
Thank you. The last question is, in terms of international exposure, I understand we have an office in China. How is that office affected?
We operate in 21 countries around the world. One of the things we've done as the leadership team is we quickly formed a crisis management group back in January when this began to develop in Asia Pacific. We've been working with our leaders in every one of our 21 footprint countries to make sure we're doing all we can to safeguard and protect our employees. Interestingly, China, South Korea, and Australia are, at least at the moment, in a very different position than markets like the U.S. and Europe and Latin America. We're working with our local leaders and following government guidelines, and we're actually gradually reopening many of our Asia Pacific offices. I really want to thank our teams around the world.
We've all had to rally together, but particularly in Asia Pacific, they went through this first, and they're now working on recovery first, and we're doing all we can to learn from the experience in China and South Korea and Australia.
Thank you.
Mariana, that's the last question?
Correct. We have no other questions at this time.
I just want to thank everyone and particularly thank all of our employees for everything they've been doing to help our company come through this crisis and make us stronger than ever. With that, I wish everyone well, and we'll talk with you again soon. Thanks, everyone.