Markel Group Inc.Figures

Markel is an American conglomerate built around a specialty insurer, founded in 1930 by Sam Markel to insure truck fleets. The group today owns twenty-seven unlisted businesses and a portfolio of 127 listed companies. It publishes neither a revalued net asset value nor a book value per share: the phrase "book value" returns zero occurrences in its 2025 regulatory annual filing, while the word "Markel" appears there 468 times. What it publishes instead is growth in intrinsic value per share, obtained by applying a multiple to a three-year smoothed adjusted earnings figure, with twelve times as the midpoint, plus a balance sheet component. And it bounds the reach of that measure itself, writing that intrinsic value does not represent a precise valuation of its business. The consequence for a reader: at Markel neither a discount nor a premium can be computed. The company does, unusually, publish a sensitivity table for its own measure: at 31 December 2025 a multiple of eight gives 14.5% annual growth over five years, a multiple of twelve gives 15.2%, a multiple of sixteen gives 15.7%.

The doctrine is written down and it is old. The Markel Style dates from 1986, drafted in preparation for the flotation, and has never been rewritten; the filing sums it up in one sentence, treat people fairly, act with integrity, and commit to winning over the long term. Alongside that statement of culture, a four-part test has guided the house for decades, and it applies indifferently to acquiring a business, buying a listed share and repurchasing its own stock: good returns on capital with modest debt, management teams with equal parts talent and integrity, meaningful opportunities to reinvest or disciplined capital management, and a fair price.

Allocation runs through four taps, and the company lists them in this order: reinvest in existing businesses, acquire majority businesses, invest in listed companies, buy back Markel shares. The house calls this a 360-degree view of capital allocation. There is no dividend, and there will not be one: the regulatory filing states that the group has never paid one and does not expect to. Return to shareholders therefore runs entirely through buybacks. In 2025, 223,000 shares were bought back at an average cost of USD 1,894, with shares outstanding down from roughly 14 million in 2016 to 12.6 million at the start of 2026, and USD 600m of preference shares fully repaid on top. A USD 2bn buyback programme, authorised in November 2024 with no expiry date, still had USD 1,497,527k authorised at 31 December 2025.

Two mechanisms carried in the accounts finally deserve to be understood. The first is fiscal: the unrealised gain on the equity portfolio reaches USD 8.9bn, and the annual letter draws the consequence itself, at a 22% tax rate that is nearly USD 2bn of deferred tax on the balance sheet, in essence a zero-cost loan from the government. Not selling is therefore, at Markel, a financing decision as much as a conviction. The second is insurance float, the premium money held while waiting to pay claims: USD 18,827m at 31 December 2025 against USD 13,543m in 2021, for USD 37,439m of invested assets, with a cumulative positive spread between underwriting profits and interest income exceeding USD 11.5bn over twenty-one years. On bonds, the stance is stated plainly: the house buys the highest quality it can find and does not take the risks of private credit. The 2025 combined ratio comes out at 95%, the eighteenth underwriting profit in twenty years.