Athene Holding Ltd made a net loss of $104 million for the fourth quarter of last year.

The Bermudian life insurer and reinsurer and provider of retirement savings products, said full-year profit was $1.05 billion.

The fourth-quarter loss broke down to 53 cents per share, compared to net income of $439 million, or $2.22 per share for the fourth quarter of 2017.

Athene said the loss was driven by “unfavourable changes in reinsurance embedded derivatives due to credit spread widening, as well as unfavourable changes in fixed indexed annuity derivatives due to equity market depreciation”. Full-year net income was $5.32 per share, down from $1.36 billion, or $6.91 per share in 2017.

For the full year, Athene said return on equity was 12.1 per cent.

Jim Belardi, CEO of Athene, said: “In 2018, we continued our disciplined strategy of capital stewardship and opportunistic deployment. We grew invested assets by more than 45 per cent, marking 2018 as a year of acceleration for Athene.

“Our multichannel distribution model generated record organic growth of more than $13 billion, and this was complemented by closing two inorganic transactions in a calendar year for the first time in our history, totalling an additional $27 billion.

“Importantly, we underwrote this new business to the same high return standards we have historically.”

Book value per share was $42.45, a decrease of 9 per cent for the year.

Total deposits were $13 billion for the fourth quarter and $40.2 billion for the full year 2018.

The company said it repurchased $147 million of common stock from December 10, 2018 through February 22, 2019.