Guardian Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (GHL) de­clared an af­ter-tax prof­it of $196 mil­lion for the six month pe­ri­od end­ing June 30, 2012. Ac­cord­ing to the Chair­man's re­port, this com­pares to af­ter-tax prof­its of $102 mil­lion for the same pe­ri­od in 2011. The pe­ri­od in 2011 in­clud­ed loss­es of $47 mil­lion as­so­ci­at­ed with Lloyds of Lon­don Busi­ness, Ju­bilee, which is shown as dis­con­tin­ued op­er­a­tions and it was dis­posed of in the third quar­ter of 2011.

The re­port said GHL's prof­its from con­tin­u­ing op­er­a­tions in­creased 31 per cent from $150 mil­lion to $197 mil­lion. "Our ex­cel­lent re­sults were achieved de­spite the con­tin­ued head­winds pre­sent­ed by the world and re­gion­al economies, and proves the re­silien­cy of our busi­ness mod­els," the re­port said. GHL's two main ac­tiv­i­ties of in­sur­ance un­der­writ­ing and in­vest­ing yield­ed an in­crease in op­er­at­ing prof­it be­fore tax of 11 per cent to $234 mil­lion from $209.

Its core in­sur­ance un­der­writ­ing busi­ness showed "im­pres­sive growth" of 72 per cent to $212 mil­lion from $123 mil­lion. GHL jus­ti­fied this by say­ing: "This is a tes­ta­ment to the strength of our or­gan­i­sa­tion, our prod­ucts and the trust that our cus­tomers place in our group." The re­port al­so said that all GHL's sub­sidiaries per­formed well in the quar­ter and half year.

"Our life, health and pen­sions busi­ness in­creased its net in­come from all ac­tiv­i­ties by 17 per cent as we ex­pe­ri­enced strong sales in our in­di­vid­ual life and pen­sion prod­ucts. Our prop­er­ty and ca­su­al­ty busi­ness' net in­come from all ac­tiv­i­ties was flat due to the afore­men­tioned low­er in­vest­ment yields." GHL's as­set man­age­ment busi­ness con­tin­ues to grow its as­sets un­der man­age­ment and im­proved its op­er­at­ing re­sults by 79 per cent.

The re­port al­so said that AM Best, the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised leader in pro­vid­ing cred­it rat­ings for in­sur­ance com­pa­nies, re-af­firmed its A- mi­nus rat­ing for both Guardian Life of the Caribbean and Guardian Gen­er­al. Share­hold­ers will be paid an in­ter­im div­i­dend of 15 cents per share.

"As stat­ed in pre­vi­ous re­ports, the cur­rent op­er­at­ing cli­mate has cre­at­ed some good op­por­tu­ni­ties to con­sol­i­date our mar­ket­place. GHL con­tin­ues to ac­tive­ly seek to ex­pand by ac­qui­si­tion in our core busi­ness and in our core mar­kets. "We have thor­ough­ly re­viewed a num­ber of these op­por­tu­ni­ties, but re­main quite se­lec­tive, as we wish to ac­quire on­ly those com­pa­nies which we be­lieve will add long term val­ue for our share­hold­ers," he said.