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Johannesburg - Shares in Liberty Group gained more than 3% on the JSE on Wednesday notwithstanding a 44% decline in interim earnings - a development analysts attributed to the recent "feel-good" factor about the R19bn group.
In comparison, rival life assurance and asset management group Old Mutual dropped 7% after releasing its results the same day. Liberty Group's shares are now 7% higher since Monday.
"The feeling around insurers is that they do look like they have some potential to the upside" said Ferdi Heynecke of Afrifocus Securities.
Heynecke said the sector may take some heart from improved sentiment on world equity markets.
Liberty Group CEO, Bruce Hemphill, however was cautious on company prospects: "We don't expect improvement of the domestic equity market in the second half of 2008."
Industry analysts believe that there is a lot of positive sentiment Liberty Group at the moment in the wake of a proposed restructuring involving Standard Bank, Liberty Group and Liberty Holdings which sits above Liberty Group in an ownership pyramid.
The outcome of removing Liberty Holdings, as proposed, will be a healthy increase in the Liberty Group's free-float to around 67% from 47%.
Improved liquidity in a company's share capital often gives investors confidence that the share price will not be controlled by one or two major investors.
Good news for shareholders is that despite difficult conditions, Liberty Group has also stuck to its policy of declaring an interim dividend of 40% of the previous full year's dividend declaration.
The outcome was an interim dividend of 164c per share, a 13.9% increase on the 2007 interim dividend. This puts it on an attractive forward yield of around 6.5%
Embedded value
Liberty Group this morning released results showing a 44.8% decrease in BEE normalized earnings per share and total after tax earnings of R978m.
Insurance companies are typically assessed on the embedded value in their assets which is a traditional measure of the future value of existing business. Normalised embedded value per share declined marginally to R94.08 from R94.44.
The company confirmed the establishment of Liberty Financial Solutions, a new business unit that according to Hemphill, aims to manage the groups balance sheet from an investment perspective to drive shareholder value.
Asset management division Stanlib reported a 29% increase in profits for the period. Analysts have attributed much of this growth to Stanlib's expertise in money-market related investments that have driven this.
Much of the investor flight to money market has been driven by weak equity markets.
Liberty Group had also expanded their property portfolio. The company has acquired 50% of Fountainhead Property Trust.
Hemphill said that the company remained committed to expansion into Africa and that Liberty Group had sustained some once off costs relating to this expansion. The goal remained for Africa to contribute 10% to Liberty Group earnings by 2010.
Responding to analyst enquiries on the expansion strategy into Africa, Hemphill said: "The problem with expanding into Africa is that there are a number of unrealistically priced businesses, we're still searching for suitable opportunities."
- Fin24.com