Analyst Note
| Rajiv Bhatia |No-moat rated Prudential reported adjusted earnings per share of $2.93, beating the FactSet consensus of $2.50 and management’s baseline outlook of $2.48. We’d attribute the beat to strong variable investment income and PGIM results. That said, Prudential expects variable investment income to normalize in the first quarter, and as a result its first-quarter 2021 baseline earnings expectation is $2.54. Overall, there was little in Prudential’s earnings release that would alter our long-term view of the firm, and we don’t expect a large change to our fair value estimate of $78.