Insurance company Generali last year registered 170bn lei in premiums, nearly twice the volume posted in the previous year, when premiums amounted to 89bn, reaching a 3% share on the non-life insurance market, as compared to 2.4% in the previous year, according to yet unofficial estimates.
“I’m quite pleased with the trend of the company, considering that the actual increase (inflation exclusive) in the premiums reached nearly 50%,” Emil Boldus, chairman of the company, told Ziarul Financiar.
He says that results are even better, because “we’re not necessarily striving to get a market segment as large as possible, but instead we want to select risks, so that our portfolio can be as safe as it gets.”
Nearly half the premiums volume, 72bn, was collected from the car insurance (Casco), against 27bn last year.
“We’re not that pleased with this increase in the car sector, but this is the Romanian market at the moment, these are the consumers which seem not to have heard of any other insurance types, except RCA and Casco.”
A significant weight in the premiums volume was registered by the fire, theft and other types of insurance for damage of goods, which amounted to about 32bn, as well as by the construction sites insurance, worth about 27bn.
The company paid about 44bn lei in damages, which accounts for a 26% damage technical rate, as compared with 27% last year.
“The damage rate was approximately the same as last year, if calculated as a ratio between the damages paid/the premiums received, but the reserves for future damage payments, which actually show the real damage rate, are higher than the year before,” Boldus explains.
He says that there were several high damages last year, which the company paid in due time: a fire at a furniture plant (2bn lei in damages) and a storage facility destroyed by the weight of the snow (1bn in damages).
The company’s gross profit in 2000 amounted to 11bn lei, as compared with the profit in the previous year, which amounted to circa 12.6 bn lei.
Generali has 29.6bn lei in share capital, after an about 10bn lei capital increase in December last year and its main shareholder is Assicurazioni Generali SpA, the leading Italian insurance company.
The Italian company, however, operates in Romania, as well as anywhere in Central and Eastern Europe through Generali Holding Vienna, which is present in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland and is to penetrate the Croat market soon.