“Now looking ahead through the rest of the year, we kind of expect our -- to be at the top end of our guidance range when it comes to overall sales for Asia.”

In context

“aken our U.S. dollar-denominated products and taken that expertise and we actually launched products in Korea. And we're actually seeing a lot of strength in our U.S. dollar products in Korea. And the Korea sales have grown 41% when you look at the first half year-over-year sales. When you look at China, here, the sales growth is driven by the expansion in the bancassurance channel. And we've achieved this through getting deeper penetration within our existing bank partners as well as with the addition of some new bank partners. Now when you look at the prior year quarter for the rest of Asia, we actually had a large group pace in Australia in the prior quarter. So if you actually take out that large group case quarterly sales for the rest of Asia were up 25% when you look year-over-year. Now looking ahead through the rest of the year, we kind of expect our -- to be at the top end of our guidance range when it comes to overall sales for Asia. So we hope that helps. Ryan Joel Krueger: I appreciate it. And then a quick 1 probably for John. Just on retirement spread, would you expect them to continue to be stable with the first half of the year and the second half of the year? John Dennis McCallion: Ryan, it's John. Yes, I think as you're kind of alluding to spreads ex VII, they largely played out as we expected and as we discussed in the first quarter earnings call, as we head into Q3, based on the forward curve, we do expect core spreads to remain stable. Although we do see a few bps of seasonality in Q3. It's interesting. RIS holds a small portion of wholly owned and joint venture real estate investments. And just kind of the nature of the asset class, which includes some hotels, they tend to have some third quarter seasonalit”