Good morning and welcome to the Markel Corporation Fourth Quarter 2021 Conference Call. All participants will be listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] During the call today, we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. They are based on current assumptions and opinions concerning a variety of known and unknown risks. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or suggested by such forward-looking statements. Additional information about factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements is included in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q including under the captions Risk Factors and Safe Harbor and Cautionary Statements. We may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures in the call today. You may find the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a reconciliation to GAAP for these measures in the earnings press release which can be found on our website at www.markel.com in the For Investors section. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tom Gayner, Co-Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you. This is indeed Tom Gayner. I'm here with our Co-CEO, Richie Whitt; and our CFO, Jeremy Noble. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our call today. This call is a long-standing tradition with one simple goal. We view our partnership with our long-term shareholders as a critical element in how we manage Markel on a day-to-day basis. We need you as partners to achieve our long-term goal of building one of the world's great companies. As such each quarter following the release of our quarterly financial information, we connect on the phone for just a bit to provide you with an update on our financial performance and say a few words about our plans and dreams for the next lap around the track. We deeply appreciate our long-term shareholder partners. We could not run Markel in the way we do without your support. Thank you for that. As always the goal today is to keep you fully informed as partners in the business. To do so, Jeremy will start off by recapping the 2021 financial performance. Richie will then address the conditions and performance of our insurance engine. I'll finish up with some commentary on our ventures and investment engines and then we will take your questions. Fortunately this call is as fun as it gets. All three engines of Markel provided full thrust during 2021 and we're optimistic about our prospects in the coming year. The beauty of our three-engine architecture at Markel is that it creates resilience and durability to sustain and build the company over time. Any one engine can power us forward, but the forward pace picks up a bunch when all three engines fire at the same time. 2021 was such a year. We designed the three-engine approach in order to be able to make progress through thick and thin. That said it's more fun to look at the numbers when they are thick. With that I'll turn it over to Jeremy to give you some dimensions of the thickness.

Thank you, Tom and good morning everyone. Simply put 2021 was a wonderful year for Markel as all three engines; insurance, investments, and Markel Ventures set records and contributed meaningfully towards our efforts to build shareholder value. Total revenues were $12.8 billion and we serve more customers than we ever have before. Starting off with our underwriting operations, gross written premiums were $8.5 billion for the year compared to $7.2 billion in 2020, an increase of 19%. And earned premiums increased 16% to $6.5 billion in 2021. Our increased premium volume reflects both strong growth in new business as well as ongoing favorable pricing trends across most of our product lines most prominently within our professional liability and general liability product lines in both our insurance and reinsurance segments. Retention of gross written premiums was 84% in 2021 which is up one point from last year. Our consolidated combined ratio for 2021 was in 90 which included $195 million or three points of losses on natural catastrophes including Hurricane Ida, the floods in Europe, and Winter Storm Uri. This compares to a combined ratio of 98 for 2020 which included $358 million or 6 points of losses from COVID-19 and $172 million or 3 points of losses from natural catastrophes. Excluding the loss impacts of catastrophes and COVID-19 in both years, our consolidated combined ratio for 2021 was an 87% compared to an 88% for 2020. This improvement reflects a nearly 4-point improvement in our attritional loss ratio, given the benefit of a favorable pricing environment and the impact of underwriting actions taken to enhance our profitability. The impact of these improvements in the combined ratio was largely offset by less favorable prior year development on loss reserves, which totaled $480 million in 2021 compared to $606 million in 2020.…

Thanks, Jeremy, and good morning, everyone. First, I'd really like to start by thanking everyone, all our teams in the insurance engines. Been just an incredible performance, quite honestly not just over the last year but the last two years. Dealing with the COVID situation, the war for talent that is going on currently, hard market conditions which are fun but also require a lot of work, a lot has been thrown at our folks and they have responded wonderfully. So I just want to thank them. Today I'm really excited to discuss with you our insurance engine's 2021 achievements. First and most importantly, as Jeremy said, we delivered on our goal to produce a 90% combined ratio in our underwriting operations. To provide a little perspective, this represents Markel's fourth lowest combined ratio in the past 30 years and a record smashing $628 million of underwriting profits. We accomplished this result despite the second largest insured nat cat year on record, which included events such as Uri, Ida and the European floods. Natural catastrophe losses impacted our consolidated combined ratio by three points in 2021. This was a significant decrease from the average annual impact we've experienced over the previous four years. In 2021, our strategy is to manage the impact of nat cat volatility worked. Regarding business production, we had a fantastic year, hitting record highs in gross written premium volumes within both our underwriting operations and our State National Program Services businesses. We continue to see many new business opportunities and strong renewal retentions coupled with meaningful rate increases. Our teams have worked extremely hard to capture the benefit from the current market and their efforts led us to $8.5 billion of gross written premium in our underwriting operations. That's a 19% increase year-over-year and $2.7 billion…

Thank you, Richie. As Jeremy noted we enjoyed a record year at Markel Ventures. We had record revenues of $3.6 billion compared to $2.8 billion and record EBITDA of $403 million compared to $367 million. We added Buckner Cranes to the family in August and Metromont at year-end and we should benefit from those two great businesses joining the family in the years ahead. In the short run the numbers are very good, but they do not come without strain and challenge. From our vantage point everything you hear about supply chain problems is real. People and material are hard and tough to come by and some of the margin pressures we experienced during the year reflect that reality. I cannot thank our managers and the people of Markel Ventures enough for how they are responding to the conditions they face. A year ago you heard the word unprecedented over and over. Now I would say that we're looking at precedented conditions. 2021 results largely compare with 2020 results that took place under the conditions of the pandemic. I would say that unprecedented is now morphing into unrelenting. The unrelenting daily grind of trying to figure out how to keep our team on the field and recruit new players, procure supplies, maintain margins and manage the countless moving parts in such a dynamic system is unrelenting. Our people continue to perform in a first-class way against these unrelenting headwinds and I am proud of them and I am grateful for their work. I also recognize it takes energy to sustain our businesses and I don't think I'm breaking any news to you to tell you that our people are tired. Me too. Despite all of that you can be confident that our businesses are led and staffed by a team…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jeff Schmitt of William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. The -- how do retentions look in some of the key business lines in the insurance segment, where you've pushed some of the highest rate? I think you mentioned they're kind of flat overall, maybe 84%. But just wondering what it looked like in some of those lines that you push the highest rate, maybe professional liability or what have you?

Jeff, retentions are good. When -- 84%, I think you might be thinking about our net retention after purchases of reinsurance, because I think that's about what that number is. But I mentioned, we have over 100 lines of business and renewal retention in those lines of business that would be a spectrum. I mean, it would be probably anywhere from in the 50% range to the low 90s in some of our books of business in terms of the renewal retention. I think renewal retentions are holding up pretty well right now. Although, it is certainly the case in some of the lines of business where rates were maybe in the fourth year of rate increases and there have been some big rate increases. There's some fatigue creeping in, in terms of the insurance. And as you go through the market cycle, it would not be surprising to see renewable retention start to drop a bit in some of those areas. And that would be things like probably in D&O and some of your financial institution lines, things of that sort. But as of right now, I think we're keeping the accounts we want to keep. We feel good about them. And I think that -- I would expect that later in the market cycle.

Okay. And right. I was referring to policyholder retention and it does -- so it does sound like you're seeing some competition return to the market, some deceleration in some of those lines that have pushed the highest rate.

Yes, absolutely. I think, everybody would say that. I think it's still a great market. I think we're still able to push rate increases. But again after three and in some cases four years of rate increases, you're just not going to be able to maintain double-digit rate increases.

Right, right. Okay. And then, a question on the reinsurance segment and just thinking about the property cat retrocessional books are largely run off now. How much catastrophe exposure is really left there? And, I guess, maybe the way to think about it is, if cat losses were 10% of earned premium in 2021 what would that be if those lines would have been run off throughout the year. I mean, would that be zero or two or -- yes.

The -- I forget what the number was, did I say about $100 million in cat losses in reinsurance for the year. I believe, that number would have been -- assuming we had none of the property that we are running off on risk at the beginning of the year, that had been $10 million or $15 million.

Okay, okay. So pretty substantial change. And then, just one last question on exposures. Can you maybe talk about what exposures are in the insurance segment? And if you could kind of break that into maybe the economic exposure being driven by inflation versus presumably you have a bit of a headwind from terms and conditions. I'm just trying to get a sense on those two components.

Well, if you're talking about -- exposure is growing, obviously. We grew close to almost 20% in 2021. So we have grown exposure on our balance sheet. There's no doubt. At the same time, though, we've achieved double-digit rate increases, roughly 10% rate increase across the book and we've been tightening terms and conditions. So -- and I don't have exact numbers. You'd really have to dig in line by line. But because of just growth, exposures are up, but exposures are not up as much as premium is up because of what we've been doing in terms of rate and terms and conditions.

Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you.

The next question comes from Mark Hughes of Truist. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning.

In the Reinsurance segment you talked about a 90% combined being a long-term target. Is the mix of business you've got now is that something that's perhaps achievable in the nearer term?

We're going to be walking towards that. Obviously, this year, it's very difficult to discern the underlying performance of the ongoing book, because of all the cat losses. But what I can tell you is the underlying go-forward book came in at about a 96% combined this year. And we would expect that to be better in 2022 but probably not all the way to the 90 that is our target. So we'll continue to make progress towards that 90 in 2022, but more likely to get there hopefully in 2023.

And then just generally on favorable development it was -- it's still quite good, but down relative to 2020. Any general comments about what you're seeing in the reserves that influence that?

Hey, Mark, it's Jeremy. A couple of comments there. So, you're right. In dollar terms, the favorable prior year loss reserve development was lower year-over-year. A big piece of that as you may have picked up on was within the Reinsurance segment. And I think that's a little bit different as far as considering sort of trend over time. That was -- a lot of that was really kind of what was happening a year ago favorable prior year adjustments on a number of sort of natural catastrophe that's within the property space, and this year a little bit of adverse development relative to kind of COVID and property creating sort of that differentiation. That was the biggest driver. In the insurance book, we were also a little bit lower year-over-year. That primarily comes from lower favorable development on our professional liability lines this year compared to a year ago. Some of that was a few specific larger losses that we recognized on older years. And then I would just suggest that we're going to continue to be quite cautious on the recent accident years as we continue to sort of let time pass and monitor claims frequency and severity trends. So, nothing different as far as loss reserving philosophy, nothing different with regards to the fact that we believe that loss reserves will prove more likely to be redundant and deficient over time. And I don't think there's anything more that I would kind of point to other than that.

Yes. And then one final question on Hagerty. If you sold a few points of your position and drop below 20%, would that be good for book value?

It is a more complicated analysis than that. You're right that in the accounting rule one of those kind of key presumptions is the 20% ownership. But we also have other sort of commercial relationships and arrangements with Hagerty. We have certain rights that come with the voting interest that we have retained from the original investment we had. So it would not be as simple as if we came in at 19.9% that adjustment would change.

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

I'll jump in if I may and also try to address. We give the very best we can to try to talk about what the economic value of Markel is and the pieces and components of that. And believe me, I started out life as an accountant, and I'm no longer an accountant, but those are different things.

Appreciate it.

The next question comes from John Fox of Fenimore Asset Management. Please go ahead.

Hey, thank you. Good morning everyone.

Hey, John.

Terrific year. Thank you. Hey, Rich I have a couple of questions for you. With the run-off and changes in reinsurance, I keep expecting it to shrink and it keeps growing. So could you talk about for 2022, do you think gross written will grow after the changes you made last year? What should we expect there for reinsurance?

Yes. I'll be honest, we were a little surprised that where we ended up the year as well, John. And again, I've talked about in the past, and maybe I need to keep talking about each quarter. I mean, your elephant hunting in reinsurance, these are -- when you decide to write an account that can be 30, 40, 50 and more millions of dollars of premium. And so it only takes a couple of elephants to really change what the premium volume is going to look like. So, as we got closer to the end of the year, we saw, just like I said, two or three or four really interesting opportunities in terms of casualty and professional and specialty programs that we decided to write that resulted in the premium that you saw. It's a little difficult to say, but our growth is not our objective in 2022. Profitability is our objective in 2022. And so we're going to continue to be very focused on that. And so while I don't expect growth we're not going to pass on great opportunities if we see them. So I'm going to sit here and tell you more than likely we would expect it to be flattish, but we're not going to pass on great opportunities because we said that we might be flat.

No of course. And then if you could just comment on State National maybe for this year. It's really grown nicely last year, which is a very hard compare to repeat that. And you mentioned some increased competition. So is that an area you expect to grow this year, or...

Look, we certainly hope to grow but we certainly would not expect or budget for 31% growth. The State National of course, benefited from the same things our underwriting operations are benefiting from which is more rate coming through and more premium moving into the specialty markets. So that helped a lot. But we've got to be realistic as well. Fiber, more years ago there would have been two or three competitors. And at last count I think there were 20-plus competitors in the fronting or hybrid fronting market today. So we're going to have our work cut out for us to grow and that is our goal but certainly don't expect 31%.

Right. Sure. And then my last question for you. There was a $41 million amortization of intangibles that's in underwriting operations but not linked to insurance or reinsurance. So I was confused on what that is.

Hey, John, it's Jeremy. I'd have to kind of compare that number with you but – where you picked that up. But we would have meaningful amortization associated with the original acquisition of both State National and Nephila. And we would have a meaningful amount of amortization that would be attributed within Ventures segment associated with the acquisitions of Ventures and then a modest amount of amortization associated with acquisitions we would have made some period of time ago. So I have to kind of cross reference, the exact number you're picking up from where but – and those numbers when we have operating revenues and operating expenses, if you're looking kind of within the other space, that would exclude the effect of amortization.

Right. Okay. Thank you. And then Tom Gayner there's been a small increase in interest rates in the front end of the curve. And just curious any changes on the fixed income side, or do you – the net interest income has been running down of course as interest rates have stayed low. Do you see that continuing or changing with the movements in interest rates that occurred this year?

Yes. I don't know how long it would be before sort of bonds we purchased with a higher coupon rate completely run-off and you do replace those with the newer coupons at a higher rate. But the philosophy in the way we're doing things really remain unchanged. And the point is match the fixed income up against the insurance liabilities and if insurance rate's at a 90 and we earn any money at all on fixed income that's a spread that most people in any financial business would be delighted with. So we got that and we make plenty on ventures and we make money on our equity investments.

Yes. I mean with $700 million in underwriting...

That's up...

With $700 million of underwriting profit in insurance that's terrific. So I was just curious if that line is going to turn anytime soon and it sounds like it's going to take more time.

Probably. And I guess the point I'm trying to convey is whether it was next Tuesday or Tuesday, three years from now we're not going to operate fixed income any differently.

Right. I didn't expect that you would. Thank you.

We've known one another for a long time. I should have let you answer the question.

Hey, John, it's Jeremy. Just to clarify that – I just see that amortization figure you picked up. That is associated with acquisitions and intangibles associated with acquisitions we made in the insurance or reinsurance space so take for example I'll tear back in 2013 that are attributed to the segments and the segment's underwriting profits don't include amortization. That's just a reconciliation point. Nothing new or different in that space.

Okay. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And the next question will come from Roland Mayer [ph] of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. With the growth and changes in sort of insurance exposures during the year, did you make any changes to your own reinsurance buying?

Roland, honestly our reinsurance buying was pretty consistent, kind of, the form of our programs very similar. I guess, the biggest difference would be we're buying considerably less property reinsurance now, because we reduced property exposure so much. But other than that, it's been pretty steady as she goes.

Got it. And then I think you talked a bit about the impact of the deflation on the Ventures business from an expense side. On the revenue side, are they -- are you seeing good pricing increases across those businesses? And what do you expect there as supply chain issues hopefully get a little better?

Yes. In the normal monthly flow of information, the quarterly cycle of Board meetings I can assure you that pretty much topic number one is making sure that you're raising prices because that's the reality of what it takes to run the business. So there's time lines always in managing that process. But we need to reflect the cost of what it cost to do business in our products and services. And every single manager of any one of those businesses is doing exactly that.

Got it. Those are my two questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks.

The next question comes from Bruce Kennedy of DS Dent. Please go ahead.

Congratulations on the strong results you all.

Thank you.

Thanks Bruce.

I have a couple of questions. First of all Richie, I just wanted to clarify and just make sure I understood the comment that you made earlier. I think you said you won't hit the 90% target in 2022 except you expect to in 2023. And was that for reinsurance or for the consolidated insurance operations?

That was -- just speaking about reinsurance Bruce, but I will say hey if we catch some breaks, we might could hit the 90% in reinsurance in 2022. But if I talk in terms of the plan we've put together, we will make progress on it from the 96% that that underlying business did this year towards that 90% but not quite get there. And thus I would hope we would definitely be there in 2023.

I think it's also fair to say that the business we're putting on the books now, we believe is priced at we'll hit the 90%, but there's a lag consideration there right? We're going to watch the development as we typically would and that will come through in later years. So again there's a count lag effect but…

Yeah. That's a really good point that Jeremy makes Bruce. We believe the business we've priced the last three years is pricing up better than a 90% combined. But due to our reserving philosophy, we're going to be -- try to be more likely redundant than deficient. And so we're going to wait and hopefully see that development over time.

Right. Okay. And then on a consolidated basis, is 90% or better still kind of how you're thinking about things?

Absolutely. Yeah. I guess, I would say in 2022, it's a little bit more of the same from 2021. We'd like to continue to grow at a double-digit rate given what -- how we view market conditions right now and we'd like it to be a 90% or better combined ratio at the end of the year.

Got it. Great. Moving over to on the Hagerty topic. Tom or Rich, I wonder if you all might in layman's terms be able just to briefly run through how the Hagerty relationship start and then -- and how it's evolved over time? And in mentioning the cost basis or the book value of $200-and-some million and then the effective value of $1.1 billion, would it be fair to say that the company is essentially 5x of it’s value over that time frame, or does the accounting -- is the accounting misleading and that conclusion would not be correct?

Well, Bruce, we've been working with Hagerty, I think it's going on nine years now. And as many of our partnerships, relationships start, it started with personal relationships between ourselves and Michael [ph] Hagerty and some of his team there. We started out relatively modestly. I think we started working with them on some of their commercial business that comes along with their auto-related business. So, a few million dollars to begin with and then we became their fronting partner and major largest taker of the risk over the next several years. The opportunity came to deepen our partnership back in -- well, I guess we started the discussions in 2018. The opportunity came to deepen our partnership and become part owners minority owners with the Hagerty family. And that transaction was completed in I guess 2019. And then moving forward they saw the need to continue to grow their business. I mean they've grown at double-digit rates that entire time that we've been working with them mid to high teens and they saw the need for capital to continue to grow the business and saw the opportunity through going public to access that capital and also obviously provide some liquidity for the family members. So, it's been a wonderful partnership a wonderful journey with the Hagerty family. And once you go from the private world to the public world and you can get a mark each day that accounts for the difference.

Bruce I want to jump in with a couple of points on that. One Richie deserves the credit for captaining the process of the relationship. And I think that story that he just told you is a marvelous example of the kind of acorns that are continuously planted around this organization over and over and over again in an unrelenting fashion. And you never know where these things lead but if you keep doing the right things it's amazing the Oaktree that grow out of them sometime. So, that's a qualitative statement that I think is important to make and Richie captained that process. And number two just in highlighting sort of the way accounting leads to different numbers on the page at different points in time. So, the initial debt that was on our books was the initial checks that were written plus our proportionate share of the earnings of the organization which is just equity method accounting 101. And then now there is a mark-to-market mechanism i.e. the publicly traded stock which you can make some reference to and because of accounting rules which has already been discussed earlier we know what they are and you know what they are and you can attach numbers but they don't get included in our financial statements. So, all we know how to do is just to tell you all of the inputs and all the facts and all the data and let you draw your own conclusion.

Congratulations. And my last question what's the biggest governor to your stock buyback program right now? Thank you very much for the questions.

We just want to be able to be consistent and always answered the bell for the next round of the fight. So, obviously, there's daily volume requirements and things like that that you need to be inside of but we wish to behave in a systemic and disciplined and regular matter. And I know sometimes and believe me there's discussions going around here. about the pace of which we're doing some of the things we're doing. But as I remember Buffett saying that in an annual meeting a number of years ago when you're getting ahead, don't argue about whether you're galloping or not. So, we're going to focus on getting ahead and behaving in the systemic way and the same way you've come to expect from us over years and years.

Agreed. Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Thanks.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tom Gayner for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Great to be with you. We look forward to connecting again after the first quarter you well. Bye, bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation and you may now disconnect.