Welcome back, everyone. We have Citizens, Inc. They trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CIA. It's a diversified financial services company providing life, living benefits, and final expense insurance and other financial products to individuals and small businesses in the U.S., Latin America, and Asia. Let's welcome Jon Stenberg, President, CEO, and Jeff Conklin, CFO. Gentlemen, happy to have you on the conference. Jump right into your presentation.
Great. We're super excited to be here. We're getting the spinning wheel on the video, I don't think you're going to be able to see us, which is just tragic because we have our fancy jackets on today. Let's just jump right in and introduce you to a little bit about Citizens. We're super excited about what we have going on. We'll go to slide five here on the Citizens overview and introduce you to our company. We have over 250 employees, if you include our international service teams, that's now going to be over 300. We have policyholders in over 80 countries, which is unique because we also do business in over 40 states here in the United States. That's a pretty unique combination, I'll come back to that.
We have over 3,000 producing agents, that's up from just a few hundred a few years ago. $1.7 billion in assets. Our in-force coverage is over $5 billion now, our premium revenues are $189 million in 2025. Let's look at the global map here a little bit, we'll look at the geographic revenue wheel here on the right and talk a little bit about that, because I think that says a lot about who we are as a company, because we are unique. We have a dot in Texas. We're talking to you here from the beautiful city of Austin, Texas. If any of you are close by and you want to stop in and say hi, we'd love to give you a tour of the facility and show you what we've got going on here.
You also see a dot in the Caribbean. That's actually in Puerto Rico. We have a domiciled life insurance company there, we do a lot of our international premium comes into Puerto Rico there. We have a dot generally in South America because we do a lot of Latin American business. That's not specifically meant to represent any single country, I'll come back to that dot and talk more in detail. You see we have a dot on Taiwan, we do do a lot of business specifically in Taiwan, we love that business we're actually eager to grow our business in Asia. Sorry, we have a call here. Let's talk about where we're doing business today. You see 2025 premium revenue, this has shifted. This includes in-force and sales.
These tend not to move very much year to year, but we actually saw a decent size shift in the United States going from 36% in 2024 to 39%. A 3% shift in a mature company is unusual. Why is that? That's because our fastest growing part of our company is our domestic final expense business, and that is 100% in the United States. We're in over 40 states now, and you're seeing that revenue now come through as some of those policies enter their second and even third year. Internationally, you can see we do a lot of business in Colombia. We've been doing business profitably in Colombia for decades.
It is a unique skill set to be able to do business in some of these countries that have a history of instability, a history of sometimes hyperinflation in the local currency, left-wing political shifts, narcoterrorism. We have a unique capability to look past all of that and understand actual risks and provide coverage to folks in these countries in a profitable way for us, in a way that provides them valuable coverage. You can see Taiwan there. We'll go down the wheel. We do a lot of business in Venezuela. All through the Chávez years and Maduro years, we successfully and profitably did business in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, then the 15% in a whole bunch of other countries like Costa Rica, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia. That's a model that we're eager to expand, and I'll come back to that a little bit.
There's a quick overview on the company. Let's go to the next page and talk about the way we view our company. One of the things that makes us unique is that we have a unified management team over both international and domestic. Most companies that do significant amount of business in the United States and significant amount of business overseas have multiple management teams. They do business overseas through partnerships and subsidiaries and different management structures. We have a single unified management team. We intend to keep that. That provides a level of efficiency and a level of decision-making speed that as we look to grow, our rivals won't be able to match. I'll end on international on this page because I'm going to go out of order here.
Domestically, we've been doing business a long time with what I call neighborhood-embedded final expense called the debit business or home service business. It's called a number of things, but these are generally neighborhood-embedded agents that serve the neighborhoods and counties and cities that they live in. They serve their neighbors. That business provides small life insurance policies to folks that have often been working their entire lives, maybe had their coverage through their company. Those policies are not portable. When they retire or get in their later years, they find themselves with no life insurance coverage. We'll provide them with an affordable policy to be able to have a dignified funeral service and burial at the end of their life, and it gives them great peace of mind. These tend to be a high quantity of small policies.
We took that business and we expanded it into the rest of the country. We still have six major states that we want to go into. We have geographic expansion possibilities still here in the United States in that market. We're adding new producers and new agencies almost every month. That's been the engine of growth for us for the last two years. Our sales have really taken off. It's been driving the increase in producing agents. We've spent a lot of our effort in the last two years really maturing our ability, or I call it building the factory, making sure that the quality rises and we stabilize, and we have a long-term stable source of profits in that business. We're excited to be in that business. We think we can bring some innovation. That's been a really, really great source of growth.
I think we're the largest, the fastest growing life insurance company in 2024 and 2025 in the United States, or at least among mature companies. We're continuing to grow that this year. Okay. Let's talk about our international business. Our international business is unique in that we're able to do business overseas without brick and mortar. The advantage that has is that it really opens the door for a global expansion strategy that is capital efficient, and can happen in a more timely manner than if we had to build businesses and set up management structures and hire a bunch of people in every single country where we wanted to enter. The way we do business today is we serve these markets without brick and mortar in the countries, and we have a lot of expansion opportunities.
Long term, well, why would somebody in Venezuela want to buy one of our policies, or Argentina or Taiwan? Where we've been very successful is countries that have some history of instability, either political or through hyperinflation or otherwise, or have other risks, like Taiwan obviously has the risk of the Chinese right next door wanting to run their country. Having the one part of your financial world that covers your family might be the one where you want to have to be the most stable and most safe. What we offer is a simple, stable, U.S. dollar denominated whole life policy from a United States. company, and that provides tremendous peace of mind for many people around the world that are in regions or countries that have a history of instability. Things can be going great today, but they know it could change.
Look at Argentina. Argentina's doing great. If you look at their history over the last four or five decades, you can see why somebody might want to still have a U.S. dollar denominated policy to cover their family. We tend to serve the upper middle income to affluent folks in these countries, somebody that might have a few Toyota dealerships or something like that, and they're doing very well, but they also know that they want to cover their family with this policy. That model is very expandable, and that's a big part of our plans. Long term, we like the stability and predictability of being a U.S. life insurance company doing a lot of business in the United States. We also like the growth potential of the international.
We're aiming roughly longer term for kind of a 50/50 mix between international and domestic United States life insurance. I think that's going to provide a really great diversification of revenue and sales and risk, and also keep our focus on growth. Our opportunities for growth are tremendous, both internationally and domestic, which is another unusual thing about a U.S. life insurance company. Most U.S. life insurance companies are very mature, and they grow by the rate of inflation roughly. That's not going to be the model we're following. We see opportunity to disrupt in a number of markets and an opportunity to provide coverage affordably to a lot of markets in a way that we think is better than our competitors. We're very focused on growth and entering new markets where we feel we can drive profitable business. Okay.
We'll do a quick hit on the timeline. You can see the company was founded in 1969, but we also acquired a company that started operations in the late 1940s after World War II. We really have a rich legacy here. I really like the combination of very modern and growth-oriented thinking along with a proud legacy, we intend to keep that. You can see some of our milestones and highlights here in our company timeline. Our earnings per share is growing steadily. I think that we're making a lot of investments in these new markets that we have entered and we intend to enter. That's going to tend to have, when you make investments, a somewhat suppressive pressure on earnings per share.
We're really looking forward to the growth in overall revenue as sales goes up and those policies get into second and third and fourth years to drive future revenues. We intend to keep the focus on growth for a while. That's what you're looking at when you're looking at Citizens is, in a life insurance company, that it's also a growth company. That is unique, and that's why we do some of these calls to explain why we are different than a typical U.S. life insurance company. Okay. I'll talk a little bit on this page, and then I'll turn it over to Jeff to talk about some things from a CFO perspective. I talked about the U.S. dollar-denominated products. We do have an expertise in Latin markets.
If you were to visit us, and you were fluent in Spanish, you're actually going to hear many different dialects of Spanish. We have people here from a lot of the countries that we do serve, and it gives you a real rich understanding of the Latin culture and Latin countries in that they are very different from each other, and they are not a uniblock of Latin America. You have to understand each country and each culture to do business successfully there, and we do. Our niche markets. The white label thing is truly unique. In the United States, in our domestic final expense business, we are able, for our largest distributors, to name a product that they want, they get to pick the name, and it's our product.
We price it, we service it, we administer it, we pay the claims, we do the underwriting, but the product is their name. A lot of our business, over 50% of our business in our domestic final expense, comes in through this white label strategy. It is highly unique. I don't know of any other major life insurance company in the United States that does this. What's really cool about that is that concept will be globally expandable and really open up some opportunities for us potentially in countries like Korea or Japan or Hong Kong. We have our eyes on some exciting opportunities for that white label strategy in the future. We also have a niche in soccer players, international soccer players. We do very large policies well into the millions.
That capability is something that we can bring back home to the United States and start doing large policies here in the United States once we get to the product innovation that I'll talk to next. Let's talk about product innovation. I mentioned what's really exciting about our products internationally is not the product itself. It's a very stable whole life policy. It's the U.S. dollar denomination offered by a U.S. carrier. To grow into some markets, we are going to need to create new products beyond whole life.
We're investing in the capability this year to be able to launch new modern products, universal life products, potentially index universal life products, and some other unique and modern products that are going to be necessary to compete in the affluent segment of the U.S. market and in some countries that have actually a fairly modern life insurance ecosystem. We're excited about that opportunity to offer those new products potentially next year. Combine that with our white label capability, and I think you've got a really powerful growth story for years to come. I'm going to end there and turn it over to Jeff for the next page.
We're on slide 11, and just a few highlights I want to hit so we can get to Q&A. On this page, it's a reading slide. There's two things I want to hit. One is the 14 consecutive quarters of year-over-year first-year sales increases. That's a leading indicator for reoccurring premium revenues over the future. In month 13, it becomes renewal year, and as Jon said this multiple times, that it becomes almost like a subscription, where the policy stays in-force by the continuation of premium paying. I'm going to skip the endowment slide and go to some really good results that we've seen over the last couple of years. We have been focused on growing premium revenues.
We had six straight years of declining premium revenues, we now have two consecutive years of premium growth, which has been a focus of the organization, back to Jon's comments about domestic sales growth has helped us alleviate the decline and start to grow again as a leading indicator of future earnings potential. We've actually had our highest ever direct in-force this past year. In 2025, we had the second highest ever amount of new business issued. We are continuing to maintain our growth and growth targets. Shareholders, we continue to grow our book value per share, which is a key metric for us, especially when we compare ourselves to other insurance companies that are, we'll just say, significantly bigger than Citizens. Let's see. Last thing, maybe the next two pages I'll hit, which is on slide 19, is we do have a low-risk profile in our financials.
Our products are traditional products. They're not exotic. We have a very conservative investment approach. We leverage some well-known global reinsurance companies, RGA, Munich Re, and [Hannover Re], to name a couple. We have a high-quality, diversified investment platform. Most of it is in fixed maturity securities that's primarily driven by regulations and state insurance departments in creating kind of safety for the policyholders. I think this will be the last slide, then we can get to Q&A, is we have to maintain certain capital adequacy and liquidity ratios. You can see that our capital ratio on the left side, which is our domestic insurance companies, is 510%, and well above our minimum target of 350. Our Puerto Rico entity capital ratio is 6.8, which is below our seven target. In addition to the individual insurance company capital, our Citizens is a holding company structure.
The parent company has cash and cash equivalents of about $20 million that can be used to help capitalize the two insurance companies as we grow our operations and activities. I'll stop there, and we can turn it over to Q&A.
All right, guys. Thank you so much for that. We do have lots of questions. Let's see how many we can get to. Starting with Nick, how are you identifying which geographic markets are currently under-penetrated but represent major opportunities, and how will you execute on them?
That's a great question. First of all, you can't just go by GDP, you can't just go by the size of the market because you have to also understand the regulatory environment, you also have to understand the competitive environment, and where that country's life insurance ecosystem has evolved to. A country like Peru, for example, we are very interested in growing in Peru. I think we have tremendous opportunity in Peru. There's an example of a country that they have largely moved to a universal life product line rather than a whole life-based product line, and we are still whole life-based. That's why we're expanding our opportunities to create a universal life portfolio of products. That will open the door in a country like Peru where we get just a handful of policies each year currently.
I think we can sell in Peru like gangbusters. Chile is an example of a similar situation. Brazil, you might think that is a massive opportunity, and it is, but it comes with some complexities. We're needing to do some hoop-jumping there, too. We're very interested in doing business in Brazil, for example, but there's going to have to be some extra steps that we take in order to seize that opportunity. In some markets, we need to take additional steps or product development in order to seize those opportunities. Once we have those products, those countries will be of very high importance. Turning to Asia, we have a lot of opportunity in Asia. We love the business we get in Taiwan. We want more of it.
Many of those markets have also evolved beyond whole life, a product portfolio expansion will provide a lot of opportunity for growth there also. That's a great question, right now, currently, I think we're largely product portfolio eliminated, that's why we're looking to address that within the next year, that limitation.
Talk a little bit more about the company's primary growth driver, maybe over the next five years, what will that be? In international life insurance, U.S. final expense, or new product offerings?
Domestically, I think we still have more growth opportunity in domestic final expense, but we're doing a lot of business there. I think from a percentage standpoint, you're not going to see double and triple-digit percentage growth. You're going to see maybe high single, low double would make me happy. The opportunity we do have in the U.S. is twofold. We can expand geographically, and some states like New Jersey or California, they require you to season your way into getting approval there, which means you kind of have to wait and there's some additional hoop-jumping we need to do there. We do have geographic expansion opportunity. We also can go upmarket.
As we expand our product portfolio, it'll expand our ability to serve the middle market and the affluent market in the United States. Our final expense success is we're really only playing in 10% or 15% of the overall life insurance market. We have a tremendous amount of opportunity in the United States. to go upmarket. Then internationally, I think there's a lot of countries that we can expand in once we have expanded product portfolios. We have tremendous geographic expansion opportunities internationally.
I'll let you close with this. What milestones should investors be looking forward to?
Well, that's a great one. Why don't you talk about some financial milestones? I think I've laid out some milestones that we can all look for on our markets and products, which would be a product portfolio expansion capabilities will be a key milestone in terms of deliverables, non-financial deliverables.
I think I would just point out, too, that we've been heavily focused on, that is really premium revenue growth. We need to see and continue to grow our premium revenues, which is a future indicator of following earnings growth. It does take a few years in insurance to grow earnings, as you have a lot of high acquisition costs in the first years, primarily due to the commissions. Second is the continued growth of our adjusted book value per share. We want to still continue to see that grow, and continue to grow our equity so that we can invest more into the organization.
Perfect. Well, thank you guys for this update, and we appreciate your time. What a fascinating industry you're in all around the world, and we certainly look forward to having you back on the conference again real soon with some more updates. Thank you, guys.
Great. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back