Korean Re ups top line by record 16%, holds underwriting margins stable

Korean Re leveraged a hardening market to post its strongest increase in premium in at least a decade while holding underwriting margins roughly stable.

Gross written premium rose 16.1%, a long-standing record, to render a ₩9.72 trillion ($7.46 billion) top line. Net premiums grew at a still faster 20.3% pace.

That growth came mostly on reinsuring personal lines, where growth measured 26% and more than offset the fractional 1% decline in commercial book.

Foreign markets delivered 16.3% growth. Asia is down to 47% of the reinsurance book, down nine percentage points (pps) over the past five years during which Europe added 5 percentage points to its weighting and the Americas four points.

Underwriting margins appeared stable on the prior year, leading to a repeat of the fractional technical loss, this time at ₩34.6 billion.

Mark the combined ratio at 100.4%, up one tenth of a percent against the prior year reading for a group that has held a tight range of 100.0 to -100.5 for the past five years.

Korean Re is succeeding at bringing down an elevated combined ratio in personal lines, down 1.6 pps to 100.3% for 2022.

But overseas business, the fastest growing area in CAGR-terms over the past five years at nearly 8%, has seen two years of notable increases in combined ratios, from 98.7% in 2020 to 102.1% in 2021 and now 105% in 2022.

Overseas lines were said to be affected by natural cat and major loss events including Covid-19, French hailstorms and European windstorms.

On the group P&L, ₩268 billion in investment earnings, up 23% year on year, more than covered the fractional underwriting loss. Net profits of ₩175.2 billion were off a fractional 2.8% year on year.

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