Mapfre targets up to 6% premium growth in new 3-year strategy; reinsurance will focus on margin

Spain-based global re/insurer  Mapfre can muster 5-6% annual growth in premiums through 2024 as it focuses on four core markets and builds out sales channels, chief executive Antonio Huertas (pictured) told shareholders at his company's general meeting.

Huertas vowed "disciplined growth, with adequate management of our geographic diversification and the complexity inherent to our presence in such different and dispersed markets."

Spain, Brazil, the US and reinsurance are now considered the core markets. Elsewhere, Mapfre will "concentrate more on a limited number of countries with high strategic value," he said.

"We must be able to prioritise better, promoting what can generate sustainable, differentiating, and scalable value and giving up whatever does not meet these conditions," Huertas said.

Top line build out will stem from new insurance agreements with banks and auto manufacturers, "more interaction" with brokers, and a digital consolidation of Mapfre's channels, Huertas' accompanying presentation showed. Increased product penetration per customer should compound the effect. Premiums rose by more than 8% to over €22 billion in 2021.

In reinsurance, the focus shifts more closely to margins.

"In Reinsurance, we are committed to improving profitability, doing a better job of controlling the loss experience and non-catastrophic intensity and frequency, while helping our customers to improve their protection levels," Huertas said.

Elsewhere, Mapfre hopes to grow in auto while trimming the combined ratio via reduced service costs and better, more personalised pricing. Life operations will go heavy on sales of unit-linked and savings products, health will go digital but avoid expansion to new markets and commercial will catch the current growth wave.

Across the group, Mapfre will target a non-life combined ratio of 94-95%, down from a 97.5% reading in 2021.

Elsewhere, financial guidance included:  three-year average return on equity of 9-10%, solvency within 25 pps of 200%, a payout ratio in excess of 50% and a debt ratio of 23-25%.

Guidance comes with a caveat:  the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a massive destabilizer. "Inflation, interest rates, currency exchange rates and economic and insurance growth may suffer high volatility," Huertas noted.

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