The Insurance Australia Group Ltd (ASX: IAG) share price is lifting in early trade after it reported FY22 earnings today.
The ASX finance share darted higher from the open and nudged an intraday high of $4.72 – its highest mark in three months — before levelling off.
Returns for the past 12 months are seen below.
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What's got the IAG share price lifting?
IAG came in with mixed results, printing a 5.7% gain in gross written premium to $13.3 billion.
Net insurance profit narrowed by around 42% to $586 million, and its underlying insurance margin also contracted by about 14.5%.
But its net profit after tax (NPAT) stretched up to $347 million from a $427 million loss in FY21.
This, on earnings per share (EPS) of 13.33 cents. It now forecasts an insurance margin of 16% at the upper end of guidance and return on equity (ROE) of 12-13%.
Despite this, the IAG share price has caught a bid from the open and is now up 130 basis points to $4.67 in morning trading.
Volume was thin to start the session, with approximately 865,000 shares swapping hands at the time of writing, off a 4-week average of 6.6 million.
The question now becomes if IAG can sustain this rally. It first started on 17 June, when shares reversed off a low of $4.14.
Broker opinion is mixed on the matter, with seven out of 11 analysts covering the share still rating it a buy, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.
However, there are two hold and two sell ratings from the same list, and the consensus price target is $4.99 per share, just a small fraction of upside.
In the last 12 months, the IAG share price has dropped 14%, but is up around 10% this year to date.
