Well, good morning and welcome. I think I know most of you. I’m Mike Wells, the new Group Chief Executive of Prudential. I’m the 21st, if you’re counting, in the 167 year history of the Group, and very pleased to be up here today presenting to you our first half results. I think you will see, if you’ve had a chance to take a look at them, they are very broad based, with all four of our business units contributing at a very material level. I’m assuming you’ve all read this, so I’ll move on to the agenda for the day. We’re going to break this into three parts today. I’m going to give you an overview of the business, and some of the key highlights. Nic’s going to give a very detailed review of the financials, and some topics related to that, and I’m going to come back after, and tell you just some general views I have on where we are capability wise, strategy wise, and execution wise, in the various markets, and some of the issues we’re dealing with. So let’s get right to some of the growth metrics. IFRS profit up 17, new business profit up 12, pre surplus generation up 12, so all the operating metrics in double digits, and of course, supporting the cash metrics. Remittance up 10, and an interim dividend which, again, is technical at this point, it’s third of the 2014 dividend, is up 10 as well to 12.31. Clearly, the performance is not only generating robust operating income, but we’re converting that to cash. And that cash is making its way to the center, and support the dividend. So very pleased with the shape, the structure and the flows in the first half. Center to our delivery is Asia and…

Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everyone. In my presentation, I will firstly run through our half-year results, highlighting the drivers of our performance in the period, before I briefly cover the balance sheet and update you on Solvency II. Starting with the financial headlines, the Group has delivered a strong set of results in the period with all of our growth and cash metrics up by more than 10%. The improvement in our overall performance was broad based, with all four businesses growing their respective contribution. By targeting and attracting higher levels of profitable new business flows across the Group, we’re increasing both the scale and the quality of our business, which, in turn, drives the growth in the profit and cash measures that are shown on this slide. This is what ultimately underpins the strong performance so far in 2015, with IFRS operating profit increasing by one-quarter on a reported basis to 1,881 million. Currency effects were positive in the first half and this has added between 4 and 7 percentage points of growth to our underlying performance, of course, depending on the metric. However, in my commentary, I will focus on profitability trends excluding these currency tailwinds as this is a fairer way of looking at our performance, for the reasons that we have previously outlined. Other notable headlines: new business profit was up 12% at 1,190 million, benefiting from a strong profitable sales growth in the second quarter. Free surplus generation was also up 12% to 1,418 million, reflecting efficient deployment and a growing contribution from the back book. And cash remittances were 10% higher at 1,068 million, with sizable contributions from all our businesses. Short-term investment variances were modest in the first half, as the movements in equity markets and interest rates were muted. Our post-tax…

Thank you, Nic. So this is a familiar slide to most of you and there’s a good reason for it. It’s the strategy we’ve been executing on for a number of years now and, obviously, from today’s numbers we think it’s working exceptionally well. There is some underlying themes to it that again I think are well rehearsed in this setting, so I’ll keep them to a minimum. But we’re not in need of a new strategy. That isn’t my objective; it isn’t the management team’s assessment. We think we have one that’s working very well and the focus is going to be on a higher, more detailed execution, increase the breadth and depth of our capabilities, so let me walk you through a little bit of that. We should, at this point, I think, in Pru’s development, enjoy more of the benefits of scope and scale, than our competitors. In each of the markets, as we’ve discussed, we have incredible capabilities. We have everything we need to address what is now expected to be a more self-reliant middle class. And that’s a trend across every market we do business in. That can be in terms of health and protection in Asia, savings at globally, there is an assumption here that middle-class households will be responsible for more of their financial wellbeing. And, again, we’re perfectly positioned in our markets to provide the services; we need to do that. So how do we enhance that capability? In Asia, we continue to scale the agency force, improve the quality, the tools they have and breadth of product. 560,000 now, I’m not sure how many we need. It’s an interesting question; I got asked that in China a few weeks ago. There are lots of metrics that you could say have correlations…

All right, just wait for the mike to come to you before you ask the question and then please state your name and you firm’s name. Can I start with Oli?

Yes. Oliver Steel at Deutsche Bank. Two questions, both around the DOL proposals. You said a few months ago, actually I think it might have been Tijane who said a few months ago, that you thought an industry worst case would be down 15% to 20% in terms of sales. How are you feeling about that now? I appreciate it’s still uncertain. And then secondly, it doesn’t sound as if you’re expecting a huge sales fall in your own situation, but if there was a sales pull-back, for yourself, how would you be considering what you would do with the capital thus released from the U.S?

Well, I think, Oliver, there’s a couple of -- I’ll put this to Barry in a second, but let me just give of my time for DOL and the U.S. Let me take a shot at this first. We now know what the details of the proposal are and, again, I don’t think the proposal -- I think it’s unlikely -- predicting politics is not something that I’m paid to do or I don’t think anybody is good at right now in the US. But I think the DOL’s intentions are good and clear. I’m not sure that this current proposal gets them there, and I think that’s been the universal feedback they’ve got from both sides, the IR regulators and the marketplace. So again, they tend to adapt well to new information. So I think we’ll get something different. But if you said, [a lot of life] commissions, that effect, that’s one element. Transparency is not material. We have broker dealers now that have full disclosure of all commissions paid on variable [notaries] and products and, again, that doesn’t change the marketplace any. I think it’s good practice. The question becomes, I think, two things out of the current proposal. If it passed in kind the level -- there’d be a preference for a level of commissions, no question. That’s the only product that would work in the structure. So there’s an element of, what is your current qualified sales? Now, that’s a different question for Jackson versus peers, because we have excess demand for that product than we are willing to fulfill on the marketplace. So you’d have to add that excess demand back on and then say, well, how much of that would have been qualified and then say how much of that would you lose? It’s…

I agree with everything he said. Seriously, Mike covered the landscape pretty well, and so I think I can understand why some competitors would be very concerned about this. We are less concerned and, as Mike said several times through the presentation, that has to do with the quality of our team and the platform that they have built, the infrastructure that they’ve built. We do a better job at lower cost and we have a track record. You have seen it time and again with the lead access being one of the most recent examples of this organization thriving on disruption, and actually turning it to commercial advantage. It is a characteristic you see throughout the Group. We’ve done it in Asia; we’ve done it in the UK; we certainly do it in the United States. It wouldn’t be right to say we’re not worried about this, but we think we have it fully in hand. I am encouraged about the outcome of the hearings which began this week and continue. I think a lot of people, including the White House and the Department of Labor, have been surprised at the level of concern that has been expressed about this and the bipartisan nature of that concern that’s been expressed. It doesn’t happen very often in Washington right now. And, to Mike’s point about it being difficult to predict politics, I don’t think, even two weeks ago anyone would have predicted that we’d now have 13 Democratic senators who have come out and made some pretty harsh comments about this. So I absolutely believe that there is scope to change the shape of this. We are working hard to -- we are involved in that shape-changing exercise. We’re spending time in Washington. We’re making the case about how hostile this is to, particularly middle-class Americans, which is exactly -- this is another one of these perverse things where the government comes up with a well-intended proposal to focus on and protect the middle class, and the outcome of what they design would have the exact opposite effect. Because, as Mike alluded to what would happen is advisors would run from qualified money. That could be one of the impacts. So just say, you know what? I’m not going to bother with it. I’m going to the high net worth customers with lots of unqualified money and I can advise them on that and that’s what I’ll do. If you look at middle-class Americans, they are overwhelmingly in qualified money. Most of these people, they don’t have lots of assets outside of their 401K or their IRA or something like that. That’s where the preponderance of their cash is and they’re going to have increasing levels of difficulty getting advice on that. So again, fingers crossed, lot of work to be done, but I think this is more than survivable, more than survivable.

Blair Stewart, BofA Merrill. Three questions please. The first is on Asia; perhaps an update on the Indonesian business which is where sales are quite flat, just an outlook statement there would be great, helpful. And then on Hong Kong, where the opposite is happening and sales are going through the roof; the impact from Mainland China and the disruption there, I guess, could be argued in two ways. It either negatively affects the business or you see even more Mainland business trying to diversify out of the country and the currency. So a Hong Kong update would be really useful, too. On economic capital, Nic, could you comment qualitatively on what’s happened to the economic capital in the first half of the year, given the earnings and the interest rate moves? It would seem that that figure should have gone up, although I appreciate you don’t want to put a number on it. And finally, I think on some of the headlines on the screen, Mike, there was a comment about the Group moving towards the 2 times dividend cover, over time. Could you perhaps clarify that comment, please? Thank you.

Okay. I think, on the dividend cover, that’s one of the easier ones. The statement stands for itself. I think we should maintain 2-plus-times dividend cover and, depending on where we are in the cycle, we’ll allow it to go a bit higher than that. I think one of my bigger surprises, candidly, in the new role was looking at dividend cover and some of the stocks in the FTSE. I think a growing dividend is a key discipline of any good management team, but I also think a proper level of conservatism in our industry is appropriate from a cash and resource point of view. So our role is to balance those two all the time, and I certainly think our dividend cover and our targets are appropriate for it. On Asia, Tony, I’ll go ahead and flip the first Indonesia question and the Hong Kong to you.

Sure. On Indonesia, we are experiencing economic headwinds. GDP is running around 4.7%, which is the lowest rate its run in about four years. And a lot of President Jokowi’s initiatives have really not getting as much traction as quickly as was anticipated. So there are some headwinds and that’s flowing through to consumer sentiment, consumer confidence, as measured, I think, in Q1 was at the lowest rate in two years. What does this mean to the business, and in that regard it feels a little bit like 2009. What we see on the coalface is, we continue to build out the business by growing agency. In the first half of the year, we hired an additional 74,000 new agents. But key metric to look at is cases per active, this is a measure of productivity, and cases per active for the agency force has come down. What this translates into, at point of sale, agents are having a tougher time closing and/or consumers are deferring decisions, and this is reflected in the flat numbers at the half-year. I think the macros remain incredibly compelling: 250 million people, it’s a $1 trillion economy, and the penetration rate is still less than 2%. Again, we saw the change in cases per active in 2009, which had an impact. As the economy rebounded and consumer confidence with that, we moved back into a very solid growth profile. So Hong Kong: first, I think you need to look at Hong Kong in -- the Hong Kong business, Prudential Hong Kong Life, you need to look at in a couple of segments. The domestic business, this is where we are selling to local Hong Kong people, this business at the first half was up 48%. Then, Standard Chartered Bank: as Mike mentioned, we met…

Nic, did you want to…?

On economic capital, qualitatively, we continue to produce a strong operating performance. You’ve seen that come through other metrics. You see the contribution on IGD. But typically, we’ve produced somewhat between 16 points and 20 points each year, so I’ll let you rate that. Market effects were positive, albeit a little negative on the FX because currencies closed a little lower, or sterling was a little stronger than the point at the beginning of the year. We raised some debt. Of course, we paid the final dividend, but we feel good about the formation of solvency through capital in the first-half.

Gordon Aitken, RBC. Just a question, Mike, you said there was no need for a change in strategy. I was just wondering, though, there must be some areas, some products, geographies, distribution channels which you maybe were looking at over a number of years, or looking at now and say, I think we’ll just put a little bit more emphasis on that one and a little bit less emphasis on that. So if you can talk about that. And just in the UK, do you have a panel of reinsurers that you would use? And are they all based in the U.S?

On the reinsurance question, there’s multiple reinsurers we use and they’re based globally; they’re not all based in the U.S. We have a variety of players. And reinsurance is not a new tool for us in the UK, or even in the U.S. It’s opportunistical sometimes and it’s strategic and risk managed with others, so it continues to be available. The bulks that the UK business attracts, if you think of that market it tends to cut into different pieces, some on size, some on credit. And we tend to be the desired home for the larger or credit sensitive, brand sensitive bulks, so that continues. Is that fair, Jackie? There’s not a -- so yes, we’re not seeing anything unusual there. So reinsurance is available to us. We’ve used it, as you’ve seen. There’s not any difference there or any concentration with a given counterparty in it. On strategy, I probably neglected the African team a bit. We’re continuing to expand there. I think it is the next iteration of what we’ve learned and I think, from an earnings point of view, it’s not material to this meeting, but it is a chance for us to take a new market with emerging middle class and digital and emerging bank trends and go in there, with everything we’ve done in Asia and other markets, to produce good solutions for clients and build something that we know is scalable. So there isn’t an appetite to artificially accelerate that, but we’re looking at lots there. From a product point of view globally, it depends on the partner. I referenced this earlier. I think we have to be careful that the well-earned relationships we have, with distributors and with clients, that we don’t let somebody else come in and take as they mature…

Abid Hussain, Société Générale. Just one question, please, just coming back to the Department of Labor, what are your options if the Department of Labor decides to abolish the payment of upfront commission, especially given that VAs are a push product?

So B share mutual funds are a push product, I think if you asked their broker dealers at the time. And I think, again, one of the things that define what an advisor sells is our alternatives. So if there aren’t -- and I think one of the pieces of advice that the DOL got I thought was from a regulator was, let’s come up with a set of standards that apply, qualified or non-qualified, which is, we shouldn’t have better advice for qualified money than socially is allowed outside. It’s an interesting discussion; the federal letter [ph] is fascinating to them. But if the commissions are levelized, the question is, does the consumer see value in what we’re offering. We have advisors now that are effectively on a trail. Some of our other share, L share products and things, they could clearly pull those assets out and roll them into a frontend commission product if -- it’s not good business, but if that was their character they could do that to a competitor; they couldn’t do it with us. But you’re not seeing that behavior. I think the product has tremendous value and, if the advisor gets paid differently on it, and that’s the only option in the market for qualified plans, then that’s what will happen. Will there be a change? Yes. Will it require good wholesaling to change it? Yes. Mostly on process; this is very material. These changes have infrastructure implications, so those who’ve done the US tour, those boring tours of the data center and the IT people talking about having one product, that’s a lot easier to address if you need to do a pricing change than if you’ve got dozens, just the reality of technology. So who’ll get there? Who can design a product correctly? Who can get it back into the advisors business? Barry’s team is already working with all of our key distributors on plans, some more detail?

Yes, absolutely. You adapt, in a word what you do is you adapt. As Mike said, we’ve gone through changes in the past that have the potential of being more disruptive than this does. You’ve got a lot of the VA product that moves from the United States already from various different providers through fee only; 25% of the market or something is fee only already. So we survive this, we re-tool and, as Mike said, the process of re-tooling for us is less complicated than it is probably for any of our competitors. We’ve got a high quality platform and we’re more nimble. But the real concern is that, again from a substantive perspective, set aside the commercial impact, it’s bad for consumers. These products exist, they are important. They have a right to exist. Living benefits with guarantees: the living benefit guarantees that we’ve put on these products are extremely important and the further you go down the socioeconomic food chain the more important those guarantees are. These products will exist and I’m convinced, again, back to the political point that what’s going to happen is not going to be extreme. I think there is too much bipartisan acknowledgement that the way this initial draft has been pulled together is, there’s a little overreach here and it has unattended consequences.

Ming Zhu, Canaccord. Two questions, please. First one is on the UK. You’ve had very strong retail new business growth and because of the delaying decisions from the retirees. I just would like to have a picture in terms of going forward, what’s the sustainable growth you think you can achieve, and how much growth you think you need in order for the new business profit to be sufficient to offset the runoff and back book, please? And my second question is on M&G. With the outflow you’ve experienced in your optimal income fund, you’ve guided further outflow in H2. Could you give some sort of feel in terms of when do you think the outflow will normalize, and what actions are you taking in terms of, are you launching new funds for the growth of your focused market in Europe?

Jackie, do you want to take the first part of this question and then Michael the general outlook?

So you’re right, we have had very strong retail growth; on a net basis that’s up 25% half-year on half-year. Actually, if you break it down, the new product and the savings and investments product that we had in situ are generating about 40-odd-% growth being offset by the 56% reduction in retail annuities. In terms of the outlook for the business, we did see some pent-up demand in 2014, as you say. Some customers did delay their decisions more generally. Most of those customers, my view, and it’ll a take a while for the trends to stabilize, most of those customers will be individuals looking for cash. So like much of the industry, we saw a quick uptick in the dash for cash in the few months and that’s starting to slow down quite considerably. Actually, if you look at 2014 and then early 2015, we’d seen such low levels of people actually exiting products across the industry. But I think some of that pent-up demand was really just 2014 demand working its way through the market as a whole. In terms of outlook, if you’re going to look at, in terms of our own positioning against pension freedoms, I think my colleagues have talked about making an opportunity out of change and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve really said, change is coming, how do we best position ourselves? We’ve got the [fabulous] franchise, great retail band, really good investment proposition, huge love amongst our existing customers and external customers. So how do we best position ourselves for that? And so we focused on a range of savings investment type products and we’re having considerable success in those. You would have seen income drawdown, those who are no longer [annuitizing] tend to go into an income draw down product.…

Michael, on funds?

Yes, on optimal income, particularly, the bond bandwagon has run out of steam and we are not alone. You’ll have seen other large players in the market having significant net redemptions from this asset class. It’s very difficult to say when this is going to stop and, to some extent, I could bounce the question back to you, which is, what do you think is going to happen with long-term interest rates and fixed income markers generally because, of course, they started to yield negative returns. And you can construct a range of scenarios from, markets staying roughly where they are, to actually having falling out of bed yields backing up quite significantly and suddenly perceptions of value reemerging. And it’s very difficult to know what is going to come to pass. At the moment, I have to say to you, we don’t see any change in the trend in relation to optimal income. But ,of course, it’s a game at M&G, not only of what happens to funds where net outflows have been experienced, but what also happens with other funds, which are going well; for example, our multi-asset range of funds are performing extremely well, property fund is still seeing a lot of interest. Frankly, our equity fund range is performing disappointingly, on the whole, with some bright spots at the moment. And that’s another question which you have to ask because, of course, we’re living in markets where equities that deliver perceived safe growing income streams are being -- stocks that do that, are being driven to very high value levels which is actually not where we’re playing. And that’s why we’re getting some poor performance in some of our funds. Again, we’d expect that to change at some point, but I can’t say when. So I’m afraid it’s an uncertain picture. We are seeing some good areas of interest away from the Optimal Income Fund, but I can’t actually give you any precise prediction on timing of when this will all come back into balance.

Andy Hughes, Macquarie. Couple of questions, if I could? The first one is on the DOL stuff and what it does for the product. I’m not sure I completely understand what you’re saying because my understanding of the product is it’s kind of reliant, in the U.S, on lapse rates. And so, if you move to a levelized commission structure with much lower lapse rates across the industry, presumably you have to drop what you offer the consumer dramatically under the current product. Second question is on Asia and the trapped capital. I’m trying to understand what that means; is that the reason behind the 2 times coverage on IFRS? What is the statutory surplus coming out of Asia in H1? And what options do you have to access this retained surplus in Asia? I presume you can use it for M&A, but is there any other options to unfree the surplus there? Thank you.

I’ll take the DOL one and, Nic, do you want to take the financials for the [generic] question. Perhaps you could address the dividend piece as well. Andy, there are now registered advisory based with living benefit products in the U.S. One of the larger distributors, Linsco Private Ledger, asked five companies -- five or six companies to build them one. It hasn’t had material traction yet, it requires different pricing, different option strategies, which, again, are not outside of our core capabilities. But there are other structures that -- let’s get the rule and then we can tell you what structures work in it, but on a levelized product you have a couple of new variables but they’re not difficult to -- think of it as a product with its rental charge expired. Similar characteristic, to oversimplify it, is that -- Chad, is he wincing? No, he’s not. Yes, I think that’s the simplest way to think about what it gives us from a liability point of view. So again, it’s not something we haven’t seen before or can’t deal with. Is it the optimal structure for value for the consumer? No. In any product, fixed index annuities, VA, the longer the client gives up liquidity, the more we can provide in the terms of value. And again, that’s a discussion that’s part of the case for the DOL. So we’ll see how that turns out. On dividend cover, it’s not related to Asia. It was a pre-Solvency II, so it’s not a -- do you want to address the [IFRS] context?

Yes, let’s just be clear, there is, subject to a small caveat which I’ll come back to in a moment, there is no trapped capital in Asia. If you look at our free surplus disclosures, you will see that we have, in our life businesses, 2.6 billion of net worth, backing our own levels of required capital of 1.2 billion. The accumulation of local regulatory is under 1 billion; we tend to use a high measure. So all of that 1.4 billion is available, why do we keep it there? We keep it there to fund business; we keep it there because we like nicely capitalized businesses. And I have said before, if you want regulators to allow you to move capital freely then you have to be responsible. When times are good you don’t take everything out so that when times are less good they allow you to take stuff out. That’s the responsible behavior. The only caveat is that there are a small number of businesses, and we’re talking of a couple of hundred million of that 1.4 billion, where the accounting reserves are negative because they are growing, so in the start-up phase they will incur losses. Eventually, profits will come through and remove those losses and, therefore, you’ll have distributable reserves on that basis. But given the very strong growth that we’re seeing in IFRS, within 18 months or so we will grow ourselves out of that little constraint. If we needed to access that very quickly, we could restructure the capital. So there are no constraints, capital can flow freely.

It’s Lance Burbidge from Autonomous. I’m afraid I’ve got some questions on the DOL as well. This is a relatively simple one; you talk, Mike, about releasing the levers to control sales. I just wondered, presumably those levers are increasing the price, so reducing the price presumably would reduce your profitability of new business. And I just wondered, as a follow-on to that, if the price comes down in a market that much, what threat is there for your in-force book, which is obviously the big driver across it currently. And the second one is for Tony on Hong Kong. What is the major driver of Mainland Chinese actually buying a product in Hong Kong? Is it price, is it product that’s better than in China, or is it diversification from a currency perspective?

Okay. So, Lance, on the DOL, some of the in-force levers, if you remember, is we pulled down available guarantees, so that actually increases the profitability of the product, if we were to go back that direction. And, again, not trying to do a primer for what competitors should do in this climate, but if you think about some of the things we’ve done in the last three years, if we reverse some of those, it actually improves the margin on the product. So it’s a little counterintuitive. It’s going to depend on what makes sense for the consumer and the structure we have, but I think that’s directionally the way to think of it. On the in-force, there has not been, in my 30-plus-year career, a retroactive treatment of policy and so, again, that’s an interesting question of would the DOL do that for the first time, possible, highly disruptive. If you think of if I had a real estate partnership in my retirement account, I can’t meet some of the requirements in this for liquidity, dealing advice, etc., so am I supposed to sell an illiquid asset, pay the tax on it. It’s hard to imagine that that will be the intent or the outcome. It’s possible, again, in details but I don’t think it’s the realistic outcome that we’ll get. So this comes back to, why does the quality of product matter? Why does how you service the client matter? Why does having the advisors feel like you protect their reputation? We have a very happy back book. These clients have made a lot of money with us and done far better than they would have any place, and the value of the variable annuity has been demonstrated to them. So we don’t have attention of the…

Yes. I think you might have answered your own question, why are they buying. They’re diversifying away from other assets that they may hold in the Mainland. They are buying other assets as well. It’s not just insurance that they’re buying in Hong Kong, they’re buying real estate and so on and so forth. Do not underestimate the power of a trusted brand to the Mainland Chinese. Our name in Chinese is, which is UK Prudential, and that is a very important component of our value prop to these people and they’ve been -- so, its diversification and it’s a trusted brand.

Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for your time and your attention and appreciate the questions. We’ll see you January 19; we’re going to host an Investor Day. I hope you’ll be able to join us. We’re going to be here in London, give a little more depth into the strategy and some other elements of the business. We’ll be able to give you details on Solvency II at that point. So again, thank you for your time and attention.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call. Thank you for joining, you may now disconnect your lines.