Letter to Shareholders Dear Shareholders, For us, 2021 was a year of abundant opportunity and strong growth. We set challenging objectives, excelled against them, and are a stronger company with a more resilient earnings stream. We achieved this due to: • strong top-line growth, • robust capital management, • solid expense management, • improved profitability and efficiency in our underwriting portfolio, • increased scale in our Capital Partners business, and • an investment portfolio positioned to benefit from a rising rate environment. These accomplishments are the direct result of a multi-year strategic journey that has positioned us to outperform in 2022 and beyond. Ten years ago, we recognized that the reinsurance market was evolving rapidly. Investors were seeking yield, making capital increasingly more interested in reinsurance risk. We set out to build the capabilities and scale needed to generate superior returns in this changing marketplace. This meant diversifying both geographically and into traditional casualty lines. We began by forming our Lloyds’ syndicate, acquired Platinum and Tokio Millennium Re and accelerated the expansion of our Capital Partners business. This process culminated with our common equity capital raise in 2020, which afforded us the ability to lean into a dramatically improving reinsurance market. We did not hesitate. We have nearly tripled our net premiums written over the last three years, focusing on casualty, specialty and primary property excess & surplus (E&S) risks, all of which have experienced significant rate increases. We knew that achieving this strategic imperative would require us to become more efficient. We set specific goals to increase our capital, investment and operating leverage – with a particular focus on managing expenses. In short, we transformed the profile of the Company to ensure that we could continue to maximize returns for our shareholders over the long term. I. Our Performance in 2021 FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE While we strategically outperformed in 2021, our financial performance in the year was impacted by the elevated frequency of natural catastrophe events, resulting in $2.9 billion in gross claims payments and a $962 million net negative impact 1 to our financial results. Against this backdrop, we reported a net loss attributable to our common shareholders of $73 million and operating income available to common shareholders of $82 million. Our return on average common equity was (1.1)% and our operating return on average common equity was 1.3%. Book value per common share decreased by 4.5% and our tangible book value per common share, plus change in accumulated dividends, decreased by 4%. In both cases, the decline was due in part to the repurchase of a substantial proportion of our shares at a multiple to book value. We believe that this will result in a long-term increase in earnings per share, and therefore benefit shareholders. CAPITAL MANAGEMENT We have built a Fortress Balance Sheet that provides us tremendous flexibility to create value for shareholders by actively managing how we deploy our capital. Our first preference is always to deploy any excess capital into profitable business opportunities, and second, to return the excess to our shareholders. We found ample opportunities in 2021 to deploy capital into our business, and as a result we grew net premiums written by 45%. Thanks to strong rate improvements and improved capital efficiency in our underwriting portfolio, we were also able to return more than $1 billion of capital to shareholders through share repurchases. As part of a long-term strategy to minimize our cost of capital, we also issued $500 million of Series G Preference Shares with a fixed-for-life dividend of 4.20%, and used $275 million of the proceeds to refinance our 5.375% Series E Preference Shares. We recognized an excellent opportunity to obtain permanent, fixed price capital at extremely attractive rates, and used the opportunity to bring down our overall cost of capital. Finally, we paid common dividends of $68 million during the year and, despite the year’s catastrophe losses, increased our quarterly dividend for the 27 th consecutive year. THREE DRIVERS OF PROFIT Consistent with prior years, I would like to discuss our three drivers of profit, which are underwriting income, fee income and investment income. Underwriting Income Our first driver of profit is the income we earn on our core underwriting business. For the year, this was a loss of $109 million, comprised of a loss of $186 million in our Property segment offset by a gain of $77 million in our Casualty and Specialty segment. The loss in the Property segment was driven by the year’s natural catastrophe events. Property catastrophe is a long-term business, and the cost of the returns that we are seeking is short-term volatility. Despite the year’s elevated losses, we remain confident in the risk we have assumed based on our strong modeling capabilities. Climate change increases uncertainty, which we address by sensitivity testing our portfolio and adjusting our models to maintain a conservative view of loss potential on both an occurrence and aggregate basis. Even after adjusting for the effects of climate change and other factors such as inflation, we believe we are being paid well above our cost of capital to take catastrophe risk. The property market has enjoyed significant rate increases over the last 5 years. We are one of the most conservative and experienced modelers of climate change and natural catastrophe risk, which gives us considerable room to be wrong and still exceed our cost of capital. Our customers benefited from our protection this year, which is the nature of our business. Going forward, we believe there are many dynamics at play that should continue to drive increases in property rates and improve returns to shareholders, including: • the poor performance of the industry over the last five years, especially in third-party capital, • the impact of social inflation, • the market’s increasing reluctance to accept volatility, • significantly reduced retro capacity, especially for higher frequency risk, and • increased cost of volatility that should raise primary insurers’ demand for hedges against their own volatility. We expect the net result of these various dynamics to be the reduced supply of, and increased demand for, the products that we sell, resulting in continuing increases in rates and growing profitability. Our Casualty and Specialty segment had a strong year. We knowingly, and thoughtfully, began building our Casualty and Specialty business during a more challenging phase of the market with the intent that, by doing so, we could construct a portfolio with embedded options for growth. When the Casualty and Specialty market began to improve in 2019, we materially accelerated our growth, nearly tripling net premiums written over the last three years. We evaluate our Casualty and Specialty business over rolling ten-year periods. For the last few years, we have been writing 1 For a definition of net negative impact, please refer to the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 4, 2022. 3 RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. 2021 Annual Report Letter to Shareholders
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