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# Old Mutual’s underlying business had a strong half, despite a 30% drop in earnings
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/old-mutual-h1-2026-earnings-cfo-designate/
- Published: 2026-09-09T02:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T05:11:59.000Z
- Description: Two measures in the same results went opposite ways, and which one a reader looks at decides what happened.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Two newsrooms read the same Old Mutual results on Tuesday morning and reached opposite conclusions. Bloomberg led on a 30% fall in profit. Business Day led on higher earnings. Both were right, because they were reading different lines of the same table.

An insurer makes money two ways. It sells policies and collects premiums, and it invests the pile of cash that sits between the premium coming in and the claim going out. The first is the business it controls. The second follows the market.

The market half went badly. Risk-off conditions driven by the conflict in the Middle East pulled equity and bond indices down, the shareholder portfolio followed them, and adjusted headline earnings fell 30% to R2.95 billion. Bloomberg counts that as the first decline since 2022.

## The half the market did not touch

Selling did not have the same problem. Results from operations rose 7% to R5.28 billion, and by 11% measured per share. Life sales and gross inflows each grew by a fifth, helped by the wealth platform and by 10X Investments, the retirement-fund manager Old Mutual bought last year. The value of new business, which is what the group expects to earn over the life of the policies it wrote this half, rose by close to a third.

The other half of the operating story is what Old Mutual stopped spending and stopped losing. It has taken R936 million out of its expense base compared with 2024, on the way to a R2.5 billion target for the end of 2027\. Fewer policyholders lapsed too, which matters more than it sounds: a policy that stays on the books is a sale nobody has to make twice.

## A dividend, a buyback and a new finance chief

The board did not treat this as a bad half. It declared an interim dividend of 40 cents, up 8%, and approved another R1 billion of share buying on top of the R3 billion programme it finished in May.

The balance sheet carried it. Group equity value per share rose 4% to R20.66, return on group equity value improved to 12.7%, and the shareholder solvency ratio held at 172%, inside the group's own target range.

Five minutes after the results came a second announcement. Ranen Thakurdin, currently the group's chief risk officer, becomes CFO-designate on 1 January and takes the job on 1 April 2027, when Casper Troskie steps back ahead of retiring at the end of that month. Thakurdin joined in 2018 and has run group reporting, the office of the chief financial officer and the balance-sheet team, which is an unusually complete tour of the building for someone arriving in the chair.

Jurie Strydom took over as chief executive in June. By April, Old Mutual will have changed both its chief executive and its finance chief inside a year, and it is still looking for a chief risk officer.