By Carolyn Cohn
LONDON (Reuters) - Legal & General's (L:LGEN) will focus on long-term investment in British infrastructure and property regardless of the outcome from this week's general election, the insurer said on Wednesday as it posted record quarterly cash generation.
Britain will vote on May 7 with the two main parties level in most polls and neither on track to command a majority.
L&G, which manages more than $1 trillion in assets, said this year it would allocate 1.5 billion pounds ($2.29 billion) to a British infrastructure fund.
"No matter who is in power, those are the sorts things that most politicians would want to encourage businesses to be doing," Mark Gregory, L&G's chief financial officer, told reporters on a conference call.
L&G's net cash generation rose 8 percent to 330 million pounds and operational cash generation rose 11 percent to 326 million, it said in a trading statement.
L&G Investment Management's assets under management rose 17 percent to 736.8 billion pounds, but net inflows in the quarter were 2.6 billion pounds, compared with 9.0 billion in Q1 2014.
Gregory said index fund investment by Gulf sovereign wealth funds had raised year-ago inflows.
Individual annuity sales dropped 59 percent to 99 million pounds from 244 million in the first quarter of 2014, following UK pension reform which removed a requirement for retirees to buy the income-bearing products with their pension pots.
Sales of bulk annuities, which transfer the risk of defined benefit, or final salary, pension schemes from companies to insurers, also fell, to 655 million pounds from 3.045 billion.
In a further attempt to diversify away from the declining individual annuity market, L&G entered the lifetime mortgage market this year, with the purchase of specialist provider New Life Home Finance.
It said it expected to write more than 100 million pounds this year in lifetime mortgages. Lifetime mortgages enable house-owners to take a loan against the value of their property, which is then paid back when they die.
"L&G remains well-positioned for the challenges facing the UK life industry and, with the shares having come off March highs we view them as being attractively priced," said analysts at Panmure Gordon, reiterating their "buy" recommendation.
L&G's shares were up 1.36 percent to 260.8 pence at 0757 GMT.
