Earnings call transcript: Allianz Q3 2025 beats forecasts, stock rises

Allianz has reported its third-quarter earnings for 2025, surpassing market expectations with an EPS of $7.44 against a forecast of $7.00, marking a 6.29% surprise. The company also significantly exceeded revenue forecasts, reporting $42.8 billion compared to the expected $19.76 billion, resulting in a revenue surprise of 116.6%. Following the earnings announcement, Allianz's stock price increased by 2.37%, reflecting investor confidence in the company's performance.

Key Takeaways

• Allianz's EPS and revenue both exceeded market expectations significantly.
• The stock price rose by 2.37% in pre-market trading.
• The company reported strong growth in operating profit and business volume.
• Allianz celebrated a 25-year partnership with PIMCO, highlighting significant growth in assets under management.
• The company adjusted its full-year outlook for operating profit to EUR 17-17.5 billion.

Company Performance

Allianz demonstrated robust performance in Q3 2025, with a year-to-date business volume growth of 8.5% and a 10% increase in operating profit, or 13% when adjusted for foreign exchange. The company also reported a core EPS increase of 10%, surpassing its target range of 7-9%, and maintained a strong core return on equity (ROE) above 18%. The solvency ratio stood at 209%, underscoring the company's financial stability.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $42.8 billion, significantly above the forecast of $19.76 billion.
• Earnings per share: $7.44, compared to a forecast of $7.00.
• Operating profit up 10% year-to-date.
• Core EPS up 10%, exceeding the target range.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Allianz's actual EPS of $7.44 was above the forecasted $7.00, resulting in a 6.29% positive surprise. The revenue of $42.8 billion surpassed expectations by 116.6%, demonstrating the company's strong market position and operational efficiency.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Allianz's stock price rose by 2.37%, reflecting positive investor sentiment. The stock's last close was at $362.5, and it is trading close to its 52-week high of $378, indicating strong market confidence in the company's future prospects.

Outlook & Guidance

Allianz has revised its full-year outlook, now expecting an operating profit between EUR 17-17.5 billion. The company remains focused on capital generation and aims for a minimum 15% additional shareholder payout. Despite potential market volatility, Allianz expressed confidence in its business fundamentals.

Executive Commentary

Claire-Marie Coste-Lepoutre, CFO, stated, "We have an excellent year so far where our delivery momentum continues across all our segments." She also highlighted the symbiotic relationship with PIMCO, which has seen significant growth in assets under management and operating profit.

Risks and Challenges

• Inflation in motor insurance remains in high single digits, posing a potential challenge.
• Cybersecurity threats are evolving, requiring ongoing enhancements to prevention strategies.
• Market volatility could impact future earnings and growth projections.
• The company's cautious approach to market cycles may limit aggressive growth opportunities.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about recent cybersecurity incidents in the UK and US, the drivers of P&C profitability, and the company's reinsurance strategy. Allianz also addressed questions regarding potential expansion of the Viridium platform.

Full transcript - Allianz (ALV) Q3 2025:

Frank Stoffel, Head of Financial Communications and Investor Relations, Allianz: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Allianz's third quarter and nine months 2025 media conference call. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Frank Stoffel, Head of Financial Communications and Investor Relations, and I'm here at our headquarters in Munich with our Chief Financial Officer, Claire-Marie Coste-Lepoutre, and our Group Head of Communications, Lauren Day. Today's conference call is scheduled for 60 minutes, and as usual, we will answer your questions following our presentation. With this, it is my pleasure to hand over to our CFO, Claire-Marie Coste-Lepoutre.

Claire-Marie Coste-Lepoutre, Chief Financial Officer, Allianz: Thank you very much, Frank, and good morning to all of you. I'm very pleased to report on another very strong quarter for the group, which is building to an excellent contribution to the year and our three-year plan. Our results are supported by both an ongoing top-line momentum and an attractive margin development. Across the organization, we are working on our three strategic levers of smart growth, productivity, and resilience, with first signs of materialization into our numbers. As you can see on page A4, year to date, our business volume growth continues to be very strong at 8.5%. As previously, this growth is diversified from a segment perspective and within the segment across businesses and geographies, which gives us a lot of strength for the future. Our operating profit is now up by more than 10% year to date. The number FX adjusted would even be 13%.

Here as well, we see positive developments in all our segments. Our current income growth is accelerating compared to the first half of the year. Year to date, it grows by 10.5%, or actually 8% adjusted for the disposal gain of the life JV with UniCredit in Italy that we did book in the second quarter, and as well the anticipated tax effect of the disposal of our stake in Badge Age that we did book in the first quarter. Our core EPS adjusted for these exact same two effects is now up 10%, which is very strong and ahead of our 7%-9% target range. Similarly, our core ROE is above 18% and well ahead of our target level as well. Our solvency ratio emerged at 209%, and our operating capital generation continues to be very strong, which gives us flexibility for current and for future capital deployments.

Given the excellent performance of the organization at the end of September, I'm very happy to indicate that we have adjusted our outlook upward yesterday night and that we expect to land the full year at least at EUR 17 billion operating profit. Of course, the year is not over, and we can still see NatCats or market movements, but clearly, we are very confident with the overall outcome. Let me move to page A5, and let's have a look at our P&C business. Here we have another excellent quarter, which is building on previously excellent quarters. We are achieving another record level of operating profit, now 15% up versus last year, as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide. Year to date, our total business volume is at plus 8%, which is excellent.

This 8% growth is ahead of our assumed medium-term growth rate of 6%-7%. Approximately half of the growth is volume, and the rest is price. Compared to the first half of the year, the volume growth has been accelerated from both retail and commercial. Our internal top-line growth for the third quarter is in line with what we have seen for the second quarter, as is our rate change on renewal for the full book, which is now at around plus 5%. We have achieved a very good level of combined ratio at the end of the third quarter at 91.6%, with both retail and commercial performing, as you can see. Also, you can see now material, how broadly spread the performance remains. In particular, I'm very happy with the development of our attritional loss ratio, with more than one percentage point of progress year to date.

This has been particularly driven by our retail business, with the benefit of the underwriting and pricing actions, which are earning through. Also, our constant focus on productivity continues to deliver, with our expense ratio down by around 30 basis points, just below 24%. The third quarter was very mild from a natural catastrophe perspective, but we booked no runoff overall. We further increased our reserve confidence during the quarter. Overall, our P&C business is doing excellently. We see volume growth, which reflects a mix of strong ongoing developments, especially in retail, and targeted growth in commercial as we manage the cycle. Our profitability is not just a reflection of more benign natural catastrophes, but also very strong attritional improvements, relentless focus on productivity, and significant prudence when it comes to the recognition of runoff.

Let me now move to Life and Health on page A6, where you can see that we are fully on track to meet our targets there. The numbers are as well more impacted by FX and P&C, and you may remember that we have disposed the UniCredit GV, which is now showing up in the numbers as of the third quarter. Our value of new business is up 4% FX adjusted, with our PV and BP up 5% at a very stable new business margin, which is as well above our 5% ambition level. We see good developments across the businesses. Our life new business can always be a bit lumpy, and last year, our third quarter was extremely strong, where we had benefiting from various promotions.

You may remember that our US life business was up 60% last year in the third quarter, and we also had some large ticket transactions, in particular at Allianz Labor last year in the third quarter. I think to get a good sense of the fundamental growth in new business of our life and health portfolio, this is actually really good to look at the two-year development between the 9M 2025 and the 9M 2023, where we have been growing by 20%, which gives us an estimated annual growth rate of approximately 10% FX adjusted, which we also consider is the right level of appreciation if you just purely were normalizing the number between 9M 2024 and 9M 2025.

If you look in more details at the profile of our business development, you will see as an example that we continue to grow at 93% in our preferred line of business, that our health business in Germany continues to show exceptional momentum once again, with year to date new business profit up 56%. Italy is also worth a special mention to highlight, with a growth of 13% excluding the UniCredit business, with the vast majority of that business coming into unit linked. Let's move to the contractual service margin, and as you know, the net CSM development is a much better indicator when it comes to the real reflection of the future stock of profit to be earned by us. The net CSM year on year is up 5% or is at 8% FX adjusted.

This is clearly well on track for our targets, as is the normalized growth of the CSM, which is just under 4% at the end of the third quarter. Our life operating profit emerged at EUR 4.2 billion, growing 6% adjusted for FX. This puts us well on track against our targets. Overall, our life business momentum is good. Our new business profitability is at a very attractive level, and our IFRS profitability is emerging as expected from a very diversified portfolio. Let's move to asset management on page A7, and here you can see how structurally our business is doing well at navigating the market environment, delivering outstanding net flows, performance, and profitability. We had our best third quarter ever in terms of net inflows at EUR 51 billion, which brings the annualized year to date growth rate to around 7%, which is a very impressive level.

Net flows in the third quarter are positive, both at PIMCO and AGI, across various strategies, platform, and geographies. Our asset management franchise continues to be supported by the performance we deliver to our clients, with 92% of our third-party asset under management outperforming their benchmarks on a trailing three-year basis at the end of the third quarter. If you look further in our material, you will see that our third quarter revenues are up 9% FX adjusted. The revenues are supported by the higher average asset under management, the continued resilience in fee margins at both our asset managers, together with performance fees in solid territory. Overall, this leads to revenues at EUR 6.2 billion at 9M, which translates into EUR 2.4 billion of operating profit for the segment.

This is supported by the continued focus of both our asset managers on productivity, which is fueled by cost discipline, the operating leverage as we grow our revenues, overall resulting in a cost-income ratio improving 60 basis points year to date, now below 61%. Overall, on asset management, we see an attractive diversified franchise with growth momentum and profitability. Let me move to page A8, where you can see the development of our solvency ratio, which is characterized by a continued very strong operating capital generation, which is fueled by the excellent performance of our P&C business in particular. This capital generation continues to support our attractive payout, both dividends and share buyback, together with some of our recent capital deployment, like the investment into Viridium or the partnership with the Royal Automobile Association in South Australia.

As part of our capital market decommitment, we are focusing on the implementation of our capital management framework, and we are confident to achieve our full-year objective of more than 20% in terms of operating capital generation. Our sensitivities are almost unchanged at a low level and continue to offer confidence of the resilience of our profile. Overall, we are in a very good position, both in absolute level, sensitivities, and our ability to generate solvency through our business portfolio. While we benefit from some positive runoffs in our operating capital generation this year, there are fundamentally a lot of positive elements to be appreciated there this year so far. Let's move to page A9, and page A9 is focusing on the special event we had this year.

As you can see, we are celebrating the 25-year partnership between PIMCO and Allianz, following the completion of our first investment into PIMCO back in 2000. We thought it's very worthwhile to do a zoom on this, and clearly, it has been an exceptional partnership we are very proud of, which has generated considerable value. Let's move to the next page to have a look at that at some metrics. PIMCO has, for instance, grown its assets under management seven-fold, its operating profit nine-fold, the latter now making up nearly 20% of Allianz Group operating profit. PIMCO is as well adding value through its strong management of almost 50% of the group's assets. PIMCO's franchise as a leading active fixed income manager has been underpinned by consistently strong investment performance.

Here again, at the end of the third quarter, for example, 97% of our assets under management were outperforming on a three-year basis. As I have already mentioned, PIMCO has seen outstanding flows this year and continues to capture a high market share of the flows seen by the industry into active fixed income strategies, together as well with the support of some of the more recent initiatives, as an example, the active ETF product that I also already mentioned in the second quarter. We continue to look for ways to further increase the synergies between PIMCO and the wider Allianz Group, as we leverage the benefits of an integrated asset management and insurance group. The relationship is very symbiotic. Alongside PIMCO being a manager of our general account assets, Allianz insurance businesses can see new strategies for PIMCO and help expand distribution as well.

PIMCO as well is supporting and benefiting from our third-party capital optimization vehicles like Sconcept that we have deployed for Allianz Life in the US. Beyond all of these, and what may be less identified in the case of PIMCO, is how innovative this business is. The success of PIMCO lies as well in its ability to constantly look across the business at new and better ways of acting or investing. You have many examples of that, actually, also in the presentation of Christian Stark in the Capital Market Day presentation. Looking ahead, and as we outlined at the Capital Market Day last year, we are very positive about PIMCO's future as a leading active manager with skills in both the public fixed income markets and across a broad range of alternative strategies, which are a fast part of its business.

The focus is mainly on asset-based finance strategies that support the real economy, as an example, the investment in data centers. After 25 years of success, we clearly look forward to many more years of working together, sizing growth opportunities, and delivering excellent performance to our clients. Let me wrap up on page A11. Clearly, we have an excellent year so far where our delivery momentum continues across all our segments. Here, I want to take a small pause to say a big thank you to all our employees for their work and engagement in delivering such results. Together, we are working on executing the capital market deliveries, including the focus on higher capital generation and the strengthening of the resilience. As part of that, both the fundamentals and the diversity of our business continue to give us confidence, even if the environment can be volatile or uncertain.

With all of this in mind, and given the performance achieved at the end of the third quarter, we have confirmed yesterday in our Adoc a EUR 17 billion-EUR 17.5 billion range for the outlook. This is subject to the traditional caveats, but clearly, we are very confident. With this, I would be very happy to take your question, and I hand over back to you, Frank. Thank you, Claire-Marie. We are now very much looking forward to taking your questions, but before we start our Q&A session, let me, as usual, remind you of the housekeeping items. We will answer your questions in English, but if you are more comfortable to ask your questions in German, please feel free to do so, and we will repeat it back in English for everyone else on the call to understand.

If you want to ask a question during the Q&A session, press star five if you have joined via telephone, or press the talk request button on the web audio call. As usual, if you are on an IP-based telephone, this may cause technical problems for you. If this is the case, please email our colleagues at media.contact@allianz.com, and we can assist you with your setup, or we can take your question, and of course, ask it on your behalf. The first question of the day comes from Michael Flemig, Börsen-Zeitung. Mr. Flemig, your line is open. Hello, Mrs. Coste-Lepoutre, Mr. Stoffel, I have two questions, please. You said it is an excellent year for Allianz. Mrs. Coste-Lepoutre, indeed, we are experiencing an extraordinary success story in the property-casualty insurance. What risk do you see for the current level, high level of profitability?

The second one, the share buyback ended some weeks ago. You said there is more room for capital management. When will you decide about a new share buyback program? Thank you. Thank you very much for your questions. Maybe let me start with the second one. We have clearly highlighted in the Capital Market Day what is our total payout approach, which is made of a 60% level of dividend and then minimum 15% additional payout, which can be under the shape or form of share buyback, obviously. That 15%, we want to give us flexibility, obviously, and we want to return back to our shareholders over a three-year period of time. That is our total payout approach.

This is unchanged at this point in time, and we just finished, we did just conclude our share buyback that we had announced together with our full-year numbers, so it's definitely too early to discuss another one at this point in time. I think your second question was around P&C and basically what are the drivers for the strong performance in P&C, if I am right, right? It was not in particular about rates. That's right, and what are the risks there in the future? Yeah, very good question. I think what we see in P&C is, first of all, from my perspective, we need to distinguish between retail and commercial. Maybe let me start with retail.

I think clearly the very strong driver for the performance in retail is the fact that we have been working very strongly on addressing the inflationary effect on one end, which has led to us taking quite early initiatives, which have fueled both the underwriting, the rate developments, but as well simply the overall pricing action. That is one driver of it. Clearly, we see that the way we have been able to do that is translating itself, in particular, into our attritional loss ratio. That is why I am always very carefully looking at that dimension. That is only one part of the story, I believe. The second part of the story is that across the organization, there is a lot of focus on generating good growth and engaging both with our clients, but also working on higher retention and cross-sell.

Basically working on the overall growth triathlon that we have been mentioning in the Capital Market Day, for which we see good early signs in some of the geographies like Germany, like France, like Latin America, like Australia, or Switzerland. We see across our portfolio that this focus and those actions are starting to come into actions, and I expect more of them to continue as we progress into our plan. The second dimension, which is very important as well for retail, is the fact that we did not go only with pricing quiz. We have been working a lot on productivity and in particular around claims, right?

There has been a lot of actions to optimize our processes, also leveraging AI, but also leveraging one of the companies we have in-house, Solved, to really secure that we are paying less for the spare parts and so on and so forth. A lot of actions as well to minimize the pain associated to the inflationary trends and to basically enter that back into our pricing also to fuel the growth. I think those will be some drivers on the current performance on the retail. Obviously, we had also good support or very good support from the mild NatCat environment, but as you have seen in our numbers, we have offset that almost entirely by a lower level of trade-off. Clearly, that is not one of the drivers of the overperformance. Maybe moving to commercial, which is a different dynamic.

Commercial, as you know, first of all, our book is very different compared to our competitors. Our commercial business is very diversified. We have the large corporate and specialty business there, but we also have Allianz Trade. We also have, sorry, Allianz Partners and our mid-corp business. We see very good dynamic into our mid-corp business, which is fueled by the Allianz Commercial initiative, with also still good stability of rates. I think for the future makes us confident in terms of focus. Allianz Trade continues its excellent trajectory. On partners as well, as part of our platform play, we continue to see very good development, both in terms of growth and margin development. That is also very supportive of the dynamic.

Obviously, there is market softening for the large corporate and specialty business that we are maneuvering with, and we are cautious about that as well for the future. Now, if we step back and you were asking about the overall dynamic, we are confident on the momentum we are on, and we will be also managing cautiously as it is planned for and as it was anticipated in the Capital Market Day when it comes to the cycle effect on the commercial side. Great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you, Michael. The next question of the day comes from Jean-Philippe Lacourt, IFP. Jean-Philippe, your line is open. Yes, hello to Monique. Bonjour, Madame Coste-Lepoutre. Maybe can you again explain when Allianz says performance has been supported by underlying improvements? Can you explain what does that mean?

First of all, on the premiums policy, did they raise or did they remain stable? On the exposure, on the other hand, exposure to certain risks. Can you maybe elaborate on this? One question I can maybe ask again is, I mean, as you understand, I mean, when things are tough and there is a lot of claims, we can understand that maybe the insurer has to raise the premiums, and then things are going very well this year, so the profits are high. How do you return this either to shareholders? We understand it. On the premiums policy, maybe for the clients. That will be my two questions. Thank you very much. Bonjour.

Maybe starting on your second question, which is, I think maybe let's take the example, let's illustrate the example with the case of Germany. If you look at in retail, right? If you look at our price positioning in Germany retail, we are competitive in the German market, and this is also very clear when you look at the growth trajectory of our retail business in Germany, actually. If you look at the overperformance of the German business currently in the third quarter, you have a couple of drivers there. The main driver is the fact that we have a very significantly improved natural catastrophes experience by 7 percentage points of combined ratio. That is a massive effect, right? Obviously, there was no negative weather this quarter or actually this year on the German business.

It does not mean that natural catastrophes are not going to materialize themselves either in the fourth quarter or going forward, right? That should be part of what we are ready to cover our clients for. Secondly, there is an improvement which is coming from the very, very strong focus of the German colleagues on productivity. We have a better expense ratio, but we also have a lot of productivity, which is coming, as an example, from the processing of the claims, from also the way we are managing the cost of the spare parts and so on and so forth, as I have already mentioned.

Basically, the fundamental effect of the actions which are needed, and I will come back to that in a minute in terms of having the offset of the pricing effect into the numbers, is coming in the better attritional loss ratio, which has been improving year on year, but exactly as expected and as needed as well to meet the cost of capital that we have for our business. Now, if you look at the inflation we see in our dedicated markets, it is a very different type of inflation compared to the headline inflation. The inflation continues to be high. Typically in motor, as an example, the inflation is still in the high single-digit level in Germany, but actually across continental Europe.

We need to reflect that as required in our pricing, but we try to dampen that effect via all the actions I have been mentioning so that we minimize the effects or the replication of that effect into our clients. I think that is the way to think about the overall dynamic there. The topic of affordability for us, rest assured, is a fundamental one, and we are very focused on this and working as extensively as we can as an organization on that aspect. If I may. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, go on. No, no, go ahead. I was going to your first question, so please go. No, no, no, please, the first question on the underlying improvements, yes. Can you maybe explain for Monsieur Madame Michu, how we say in France, what you mean with that?

Yeah, I think so the underlying improvement I was mentioning is exactly what I was referring to is the fact that when we look at our loss ratio, so loss ratio is the total level of losses we are paying against the premium we receive. We are tranching that loss ratio into different components, so that's becoming a bit technical, but we have what we call the attritional, which is the pure type of both frequency of severity of normal losses which are happening. Then we have what is related to the very exceptional losses and what is related to the natural catastrophes. When you look at the pure technical development of the business, you need to look at what are the standard losses making. That's a very important aspect, in particular in retail, because that's the way we are driving the portfolios.

What we see now is that with all the actions that have been taken, we see the improvement of this fundamental piece of our loss ratio. That is what I call the fundamental improvements. That is a very important aspect for us in terms of overall steering. I have a question on New Caledonia. You were saying about the claim you had with others. Generally, are you still active in this market or did you retire from New Caledonia? I think on New Caledonia, the key point is what is the overall legal frame and environment into which we can operate or not when we are insuring. I think it is very important for us when we are underwriting a contract with our clients that we have clarity on how typically the state will react in a certain environment.

The issue we had with New Caledonia is the fact that while we were thinking there will be the state intervening in terms of riots, that did not materialize itself at all. You are in a different type of environment compared to the environment against which you were providing the insurance coverage. That is part of the conversation, if you want, for us to decide yes or no in general to be insuring our clients. Thank you very much, Jean-Philippe. Next question will come from Tommy Holderid from Handelsblatt. Tommy, your line is open. Hi everyone. Thank you for taking my question. Allianz was recently victim to cyber attacks in the US in the summer and more recently in the U.K.

Maybe you could comment on if you're planning on changing your cybersecurity efforts as a consequence and if you're expecting, I don't know, financial impact from these attacks. Thank you very much for your question. We have a very strong cybersecurity setup in place. We always have. I cannot share with you numbers, but you would be astonished if you were to know how many cyber attacks we are withstanding every day and basically coping with. We have a very strong setup. Obviously, we always are revisiting our cyber prevention setup because this is a risk that is constantly evolving, and we have to be on top of it as much as we can constantly, right?

Maybe if you allow me, on both the U.K. and the AZ Life attacks, those are very specific attacks, both on well-known or well-reported cyber attacks that went into specific systems. The Oracle e-business suite for the U.K. and third-party cloud-based CRM system at AZ Life. Both events are absolutely isolated and did not have anything to do with the broader Allianz group. You need really to look at those two as independent events, entirely separated. That's the way to look at it. Maybe on the U.K. one, which is the most recent one, it has been an incident where we have obviously taken all the actions that are needed, where we have also reported to both the authorities and the investigation set up the matter very quickly.

The incidents only affect Allianz U.K. and represent less than 0.1% of our total customers in the U.K. It is a very, very small base. There is no operational impact, and obviously, the business did entirely continue as normal. As a result of that event, we have contacted 80 current clients and 670 past customers. Obviously, we have notified them and we are engaging with them in case of questions. As always, we are very sorry for what happened to them, and we are available to support them as required. Overall, clearly, completely isolated, completely separated, very small, and as well, we are very active to be ready to cope against those situations in general. Thank you. Thank you, Claire-Marie. Our next question comes from Ben Dyson. Ben Dyson, your line is open, please. Hi, good morning.

Yeah, I've got a couple of questions, if I may. One was just on the, you mentioned earlier that the benefit from lower natural catastrophes was offset by lower contributions from runoff. I was just wondering if you could say a bit more about why there was a lower contribution from runoff and if it was, if that meant that you'd been strengthening reserves in some areas and if so, what that was for. The second question I had was around the collapse of First Brands and Tricolor in the US, whether I just wanted to ask whether Allianz had any exposure either on the investment side or on the underwriting side, for example, through Allianz Trade to those collapses. Thank you. Thanks a lot for your question.

On your question on NatCat and the runoff, indeed, we have increased confidence in our reserve level as part of this offset. On your question on First Brands, as you know, and I mean, as a matter of policy and also for trust and confidence of our clients, we never comment on individual exposures on a single-name basis. What I can just mention to you is that in the overall context of Allianz Trade, first of all, you have seen again the excellent numbers of Allianz Trade. Allianz Trade is very good at maneuvering the type of environments we are into. Obviously, the automobile sector has been under quite some scrutiny in the current environment, given the tariffs in particular and also the various effects on the supply chain.

Allianz Trade is always very good at looking at early signs and acting proactively when it comes to this type of exposure. That is just the overall approach and the way that Allianz Trade Credit is performed as a business. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ben. A question from Maximilian Foltz from Plato has reached us via email. I will just read it out for the benefit of everybody. The question about the business as a whole. In Germany, we are seeing many insurers increasing their share of European business at the expense of German business because the German market is saturated. How is this affecting you? Is the share of German business in your European business declining, and what is your strategy? I think clearly I was mentioning excellent momentum in our P&C portfolio.

Core continental Europe, you can see that we benefit from a very strong level of growth across the portfolio, including for the German business that is performing extremely well and has done a lot of work to secure and to leverage, I will say, the growth triathlon that we see translated itself into practice as we speak. Clearly, Allianz Fairs is seeing a very nice and positive development. We also see very nice and positive developments on our Allianz Direct business. Allianz Direct has seen an internal growth of 14% into the quarter and actually 7% is volume into that business. We are comprehensively on a good trajectory, I will say, in the overall setup. Thank you, Clémerie. I see in the line a follow-up question from Tommy Holderid from Handelsblatt. Tommy, do you have a follow-up question? Yes, thank you. Sorry. Ms.

Kassel-Putter, you mentioned the Viridium deal that just went through this summer. On that, do you plan on leveraging the Viridium IT platform and transferring life insurance policies from Allianz to Viridium in European markets, maybe even without selling them, but maybe just using the IT platform and having Viridium manage some closed portfolios? I think for Viridium, maybe just overall, let me recap a bit. Viridium is an investment for us. First of all, I like this investment because it comes with good expectations when it comes to return, right? That is a good investment on a standalone basis. The second aspect of the Viridium investment is the fact that it is part of our play between the asset management and the life insurance business, basically offering good opportunities as well for PIMCO and AGI in terms of assets under management.

The last piece is indeed related to the fact that we believe as a company and as an organization, also together with other insurers, that we need to have a high-quality life backbook operator available in Europe. We believe we can support as part of that setup in doing so. You are right that for some of our portfolios, there could be opportunities for us to be ourselves a client of Viridium. Not in Germany because today, if you look at our unit cost, given the size of Leben, there is no interest whatsoever to go into that direction. That can be interesting for some other European market where together, maybe with other insurers, we would also be interested in doing so. That will require to optimize indeed the IT system of Viridium, which is today a German market system.

You need to enhance the features of the system to make it working for other markets. That is part of the strategic initiatives that Viridium is looking at to balance investment into a new platform and market opportunities. I cannot speak for Viridium, but certainly that is the work they are doing at this stage. I guess you cannot give more detail on what countries you are looking at specifically, right? No, not really. I think you could identify that fairly easily. As an example, if you were to look at our capital market material, you will see some insights. Appreciate it. Thank you. You are welcome. Thank you, Tommy. We have got another follow-up question from Ben Dyson from S&P. Ben, your line is open. Okay, thanks for taking a follow-up question. I just had a quick question on reinsurance.

Obviously, with particularly property catastrophe prices coming down, I was just wondering if there's anything that you're going to change about your reinsurance buying strategy to January 1 this year. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Indeed, we see this softening cycle on the reinsurance side, which for us is a positive, as you mentioned, right? Because we are a net buyer of reinsurance, so that's a good thing for us. I mean, at this point in time, we are really happy with our reinsurance program. You may remember that we actually had to adjust a bit our reinsurance program when the reinsurance market did go into hardening. We had to increase some of our retentions and so on and so forth. Now those retentions have not moved. If you want, the implicit economic value of the retentions is down and up for us.

We like overall the program. What we may do is that if the conditions are really good and if we see appetites from some of, I mean, from the reinsurance market for certain type of more optimistic coverage, which gives us maybe high level of risk-return profile, like trading, as an example, volatility against more certainty, in particular at a lower return period, there we may adjust our reinsurance program. Overall, short answer would be positive for us, and we are not planning adjustments to our program. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ben. This appears to be the last question for today. Thank you very much for your active participations during this call. Just as usual for your calendars, we will report our financial results for the full year on February 26th, and we look forward to continuing our exchange then.

This concludes today's media call on our 3Q and 9-month financial results. Have a great remaining day. Thank you and goodbye.

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