Lufax Holding Ltd (NYSE:LU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Emma Xu: I have 3. The first one is about your loan growth. What’s your loan growth plan in the coming quarters? And what are the assumptions underpinning the current growth plan? The second one is about your cost. Are there room for you to continue optimizing costs, including funding cost, sales and marketing costs and other operating costs? And the third one is about your dividend policy. We note that you changed your dividend policy. So could management comment on the change and its impact to the shareholders?

Greg Gibb: Sure. So on the first 2, and I’ll ask David to also elaborate on the third point, on loan growth, what we’re really looking at is the overall improvement of the key lead indicator C-M3, right? So what we’ve seen is that being elevated through Q4, not increasing as fast as what we’ve seen in some of the other previous quarters but nonetheless remaining at a higher level. So while we continue to prioritize new loan growth at the moment to the best customer segments in the best regions, broader loan growth will depend upon us seeing a more across-the-board improvement in some of those lead indicators. So we hope that, that improvement will be something that we see in the next 1 to 2 quarters, right? As we see that improvement, we will then uptick in our overall loan growth.

But as Y.S. said, our bias at the moment is to go for quality over volume. And so that’s something that we will probably have that stance, I think, through Q1 and into Q2. But indeed, if we see that improvement then in the second half, there will be more opportunities to enhance that relative loan growth. On the cost side, we have been optimizing starting in Q4. It goes through into Q1 in terms of optimizing lower productivity sales force, reducing some management layering and indeed optimizing mid- and back-office costs. All of the execution of this is happening really mostly in Q1, a little bit into Q2. There’s a little bit of room to optimize. I think it’s something that really is in line with our overall business growth. But in terms of funding costs, we’re probably not going to see a huge optimization in the near term on that front even though we have seen improvement there over the last couple of quarters.

On dividend, just a high-level comment, which is that for the last 2 years, we basically have announced a dividend policy of 20% to 40%. This time, we basically kept within that range. Cash dividend for the full year of 2022 is 40%. So the overall range hasn’t changed. What we did modify slightly is that for 2021, our dividend id out in 2 halves. And so what we have done is saying for the full year of 2022, we will take it to a total of 40%. The dividend that was paid out in the first half of 2022 was really based at 32%. And so we had basically brought it at par across the entire year of 40%. I don’t know, David, if you want to add any other comments on the dividend policy.

David Choy: Yes. Greg has given pretty comprehensive comments on the dividend. Yes, it is — nothing changed in that the frequency of dividend paying money is not changed. The range, the dividend payout ratio that’s approved by the Board didn’t change of 20% to 40%. The subtle change is really on how to calculate on a semiannual basis or on a full year basis. That is the subtle change. This subtle change, we believe, will leave management more flexibility, and we are able to develop greater value to our shareholders. So I believe it is positive to all shareholders.

Operator: There are no further questions. This concludes our Q&A session for today. I’ll now hand the call back over to our management team for closing remarks.

Xinyan Liu: Thank you. So this concludes today’s call. Thank you all for joining the conference call. If you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact the company’s IR team. Thanks again.

Operator: Thank you. That concludes today’s call. Thank you, everyone, for attending. You may now disconnect.

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