Brian Evanko
President & Chief Executive Officer, Cigna Healthcare; Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Of at The Cigna Group
Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone.
Today, I'll review Cigna's fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 results, and I'll provide our outlook for 2025. For full-year 2024, we reported consolidated adjusted revenues of $247.1 billion. Adjusted after-tax earnings of $7.7 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $27.33.
Our performance within the Evernorth Health Services segment ended the year strong with particular momentum in Specialty and Care services. Despite this, our enterprise earnings results fell short of our expectations, driven by higher-than-expected medical costs in our stop-loss products within the Cigna Healthcare segment. This resulted in a full-year medical care ratio of 83.2%, which was above our guidance range. We are taking corrective action to recapture margin and we remain confident in the long-term strength of our business despite this short-term pressure.
Now more specific to Cigna Healthcare's fourth-quarter results. Fourth-quarter 2024 revenues were $13.3 billion, pre-tax adjusted earnings were $511 million and the medical care ratio was 87.9%. As I noted, fourth-quarter earnings fell below our expectations as we observed elevated medical costs in stop-loss. Results of our other products were in-line with expectations, exhibiting a continuation of elevated trends that we had seen throughout the year.
Taking a step-back, it's important to note that stop-loss is a unique product within our portfolio where employers limit their risk from unexpected high-cost claims by transferring that risk for medical costs above a specific individual or aggregate employer dollar amount. We can see variability in this product at times, but we have generated and continue to expect attractive margins over the long-term.
This year, variability was more pronounced in the fourth-quarter as we had an increase in the number of high-cost claimants related to cost pressures from the continued acceleration in the prescribing and use of specialty medications, as well as elevated high acuity surgical activity. The fourth-quarter also tends to be when more client settlements transpire, including true-ups for the full calendar year of activity. We had seen some of these trends emerge in the third-quarter and began pricing for higher trend on high-dollar claims, but did not capture the full extent of this trend acceleration that materialized in the fourth-quarter. And as a result, we expect a slightly higher MCR for stop-loss in 2025. While this negatively impacts near-term margin, we expect to recapture approximately 100 basis-points of margin in the overall Cigna Healthcare segment over the next two years, with the majority in 2026 and the remaining in 2027. We will do this by balancing pricing action, affordability initiatives, operating cost-efficiency and continued investments.
Now turning to Evernorth. 2024 highlighted another year of sustained growth, particularly within the Specialty and Care segment, highlighting the attractiveness of our market-leading clinical capabilities and innovative solutions that create affordability for customers and patients amidst the growing trend of pharmacological innovation. Adjusted revenues for fourth-quarter 2024 grew 33% to $53.7 billion, and pretax adjusted earnings grew 14% to $2.1 billion, in-line with expectations.
Moving to our businesses within Evernorth, Specialty and Care Services adjusted revenue grew 18% to $23.5 billion and adjusted earnings grew 27% to $948 million. This continues the pattern observed from last quarter, which, which reflects growth across our specialty businesses, driven by higher utilization of specialty medications, as well as a continued increase in the adoption of Humira biosimilars. By the end-of-the fourth-quarter, we saw almost half of eligible Humira scripts transition to biosimilars. Pharmacy benefit services also posted robust growth, reflecting client wins and the continued demand for new drugs through our innovative products and solutions. Pre-tax adjusted earnings increased to $1.2 billion as our differentiated capabilities continue to drive affordability and value to our patients, customers and clients.
Overall, the fourth-quarter capped another strong year for Evernorth with full-year pre-tax adjusted earnings growing 9% for the year. We are the industry-leader in pharmacy benefit services and in specialty Pharmacy and our strong 2024 performance gives us confidence for sustained attractive growth over the long-term.
Now turning to our 2025 outlook. First, I'd note that the divestiture of our Medicare businesses to HCSC remains on-track to close-in the first-quarter and this is contemplated in our outlook. We expect full-year 2025 consolidated adjusted revenues of at least $252 billion. And we expect full-year 2025 consolidated adjusted income from operations to be at least $7.9 billion or at least $29.50 per share. As David mentioned, we are accelerating investments that will positively impact the way our customers and patients experience healthcare. Our outlook reflects up to $150 million in costs for these initiatives, split between Evernorth and Cigna Healthcare. When considering earnings seasonality, 2024 is not representative of typical patterns, given the dynamics I referenced with our stop-loss products. As such, we would expect the adjusted earnings per share pattern for 2025 to be more similar to 2023's pattern.
Now turning to our 2025 outlook for each of our segments. In Evernorth, we expect full-year 2025 adjusted earnings of at least $7.2 billion. This represents year-over-year growth within our long-term growth target range on a normalized basis. Within Evernorth, we expect first-quarter earnings to contribute slightly below 20% of full-year Evernorth earnings.
For Cigna Healthcare, we expect full-year 2025 adjusted earnings of at least $4.1 billion. This represents mid-single-digit year-over-year growth on a normalized basis. Within Cigna Healthcare, we expect approximately 55% of full-year earnings to be in the first-half of the year, slightly more weighted to the first-quarter. Assumptions in our Cigna Healthcare outlook for 2025 include our medical care ratio to be in the range of 83.2% to 84.2%. This reflects the expectation that our stop-loss MCR continues to be above target levels for full-year 2025. We expect the first-quarter 2025 medical care ratio to be below the low-end of the full-year guidance range to reflect typical seasonal patterns. We expect approximately 18.1 million total medical customers at year-end, reflecting the divestiture of our Medicare businesses to HCSC, a reduction in individual exchange customers and growth within our US employer select and middle-market segments.
For the enterprise, we project an adjusted SG&A ratio of approximately 5.4% for 2025. This percentage is lower in 2025, largely reflecting mix due to the absence of our Medicare businesses, which carried a higher SG&A ratio compared to the consolidated average. And we expect the consolidated adjusted tax-rate to be approximately 19%.
Now moving to our 2024 capital management position and 2025 capital outlook. Our fourth-quarter cash-flow is quite strong and we finished full-year by delivering $10.4 billion of cash-flow from operations. In 2024, we repurchased 20.9 million shares of common stock for approximately $7 billion. In addition, the Board of Directors recently approved an increase of $6 billion in incremental share repurchase authorization, bringing the company's total share repurchase authorization to $10.3 billion as of December 31, 2024. Finally, we returned $1.6 billion to shareholders via dividends in 2024.
Now framing our 2025 capital outlook. We expect to deliver approximately $10 billion of cash-flow from operations with the strength of our efficient service-based model. We expect to deploy approximately $1.4 billion to capital expenditures. And we expect to deploy approximately $1.6 billion to shareholder dividends, reflecting our quarterly dividend of $1.51 per share, an 8% increase on a per share basis. Our guidance assumes full-year weighted-average shares outstanding to be in the range of $266 million to 270 million shares. Our capital deployment priorities remain consistent with our long-term framework. We expect some debt paydown in 2025 as we look to bring our leverage ratio closer to our 40% target. As it relates to the sale of our Medicare businesses, we continue to expect a majority of proceeds will go towards share repurchase.
Now to close. As we look to 2025 and beyond, we remain confident in our long-term strategy and our ability to deliver sustainable growth through our differentiated portfolio of businesses. As David mentioned, we're operating in a highly dynamic environment. But as we've demonstrated in the past, we have a proven track-record of meeting challenges and taking the actions to deliver affordable and innovative solutions for our customers and patients. We're confident in our ability to deliver full-year 2025 adjusted earnings of at least $29.50 per share, which we believe is prudent at this time given the dynamic environment.
And with that, we'll turn it over to the operator for the Q&A portion of the call.