A Canadian flag flies in the Bay Street financial district in Toronto, Aug. 5, 2022.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Sagicor Financial Co. Ltd.
Revenue (TTM to Q3) US$3.9 billion
Core Profit (TTM to Q3) US$85 million
Three-year share price gain: 16.5%
P/E ratio (trailing, Nov. 2024) 7.1
Sometimes CEOs are shy when talking about their stock price. But Sagicor’s Andre Mousseau was eager to sit down and do that in Toronto, even though the Barbados-based life insurer, which trades on the TSX, was in a quiet time before releasing 2024 full-year financial results in late March.
“I think we have tremendous value,” he says. Mousseau, who’s 47 and was named CEO in 2023, says Sagicor is a significantly cheaper mid-cap alternative to Canada’s big four life insurers—Manulife, Sun Life, Great-West Lifeco and iA Financial—which have traded recently at an average price-to-earnings ratio of 11.6.
Plus, Sagicor offers prospects of growth—and plenty of it—at a reasonable price. “We have grown our assets by about 150% over the past five years. We have doubled the underlying profitability. We have doubled the underlying deployable capital,” he says. “That is a growth company.”
But explaining Sagicor’s history and how many Canadians are now involved in running it takes a little longer. The company was founded as the Barbados Mutual Life Assurance Society in 1840, and by 2019, it was the biggest life insurer in the former British colonies in the Caribbean.
You might assume that is a volatile, high-growth region, but you’d be quite wrong, says Mousseau. Institutions there are mature, and Sagicor already had 50% to even 80% market share. Caribbean insurance regulators “make sure that everything is very prim and proper,” he says.
A former private equity specialist, Mousseau was part of a private capital group that bought Sagicor in 2019 and took it public on the TSX. The big idea was to deploy much of the capital the company was throwing off into fast-growing niche markets in North America, such as annuities for retiring baby boomers.
But the COVID-19 pandemic hampered efforts to explain the strategy. Then, in August 2022, Sagicor announced its big $375-million acquisition of ivari, the former Transamerica Life Canada, which closed the following year. Even so, Mousseau says Sagicor’s early attempts to explain the deal to stock investors “landed with something between a whimper and a thud.”
But now Sagicor has several quarters of strong earnings under its belt, and about 70% of its business is in North America. Mousseau says the company has “a really robust strategic plan” that foresees double-digit growth for the next three years and beyond.
He’s hoping that a lot more investors are listening.
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