Investment income drives Athene Q2 results increase

Athene Holding has announced that its net income for the second quarter of 2019 was $720 million, more than double the $257 million it reported for the same period of 2018.

Athene said that this increase from the prior year quarter was primarily driven by favourable changes in the fair value of reinsurance assets related to the decrease in Treasury rates, as well as an increase in adjusted operating income.

Adjusted operating income for the second quarter 2019 was $370 million, compared to adjusted operating income for the second quarter 2018 of $288 million. According to Athene the increase from the prior year quarter was primarily driven by rising investment income related to continued invested asset growth.

“In the second quarter, strong investment returns drove near-record earnings as our business generated an adjusted operating ROE of 19 percent in Retirement Services,” said Jim Belardi, CEO of Athene. “Our adjusted book value of nearly $50 per share continues to accrete in line with our superior long-term track record of 17 percent compound annual growth.

“As we have consistently stated, we will deploy capital opportunistically across organic and inorganic growth initiatives, share repurchases, and bolstering for ratings upgrades, as we seek the highest risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders. In the current environment, it’s clear the market is improperly discounting our growing earnings power, which led us to repurchase $376 million of our shares in the second quarter at an average price of less than 90 percent of adjusted book value per share and high-teens returns. Following another increase in our repurchase capacity, our Board has now authorized nearly $1 billion in the past eight months. Given the attractive levels at which we’re executing, we believe this method of capital deployment is very accretive to shareholders.”