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# One South African insurer now has five businesses in the billion-rand club
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/momentum-r7-billion-earnings-target-year-early/
- Published: 2026-09-18T03:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T03:44:59.000Z
- Description: Normalised headline earnings rose 13% to R7.06 billion for the year to June, clearing the Impact strategy's target twelve months ahead of plan, with five business units each earning more than a billion rand.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Momentum can describe last year's profit three different ways, and it leads with the biggest. Normalised headline earnings came to R7.06 billion for the twelve months to the end of June, up 13%. That is the measure the group's Impact strategy set a R7 billion target for, and the target was not due until next year.

Normalised headline earnings takes two things out: the shares the group holds in itself through the iSabelo staff trust, and the annual write-off of what it paid over the odds for businesses it bought. Take nothing out and the accounting profit is R6.81 billion. Count only what the businesses themselves made and operating profit is R5.97 billion, up 9%. Return on equity, profit against what shareholders put in, was 21.7%.

## Five units, and three of them are new to the list

Chief executive Jeanette Marais's reading is that market movements did less of the work this year than last, and that every business in the group is now profitable. The evidence is in the spread. Five of Momentum's businesses each earned more than a billion rand, where Momentum Retail and Momentum Corporate used to manage it between them. Metropolitan Life got there on product design, costs and the quality of what its salespeople write, Momentum Investments after pulling a scattered portfolio behind one strategy, and Guardrisk after widening what it underwrites.

Metropolitan Life is the odd one. On the face of it it had a poor year, with new business sales down 14%, to R5.6 billion. Business Day reports that as deliberate: a stricter line on which business to take and how the sales force is run. The payoff sits elsewhere, in the value of the new business it wrote, which went from a R13 million loss to a R60 million profit.

Daily Investor reports that Momentum also won the administration contract for the Bonitas medical scheme during the year, taking its share of the health market from 22% to 30% and making it the second-largest health insurer in the country.

## What the money did

Shareholders get a final dividend of 120 cents, taking the year's payout to 230 cents, up 31%. That is a little over two-fifths of earnings, inside the range Momentum aims for.

The group also finished a R1 billion buyback in April, repurchasing 27.4 million shares. A buyback is the other way of returning cash: the company buys its own shares off the market, so the holders left behind own a bigger claim on what it earns. Momentum reckons it bought at an average 28% discount to what the business is worth on its own books, which it puts at R388 million of value created.

The strategy that produced all of this ran out with it. Momentum says it will publish one running to 2030 within the next twelve months, and it writes that into a year its own management calls challenging: Middle East tensions, modest local growth, and households Marais says are still absorbing high living costs.