The world’s largest professional non-life reinsurers

The damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina last year meant that the only two US/Bermudian reinsurance companies to post underwriting profits last year were Arch Capital and Harbor Point (formerly a reinsurance division of the Chubb group)

Aggregate net premiums written by the world’s top 10 non-life reinsurers (table 1) stood at US$72.9bn in 2005, according to WIR ’s latest annual survey of the market. This figure represented a 13.5% decrease on 2004. At the same time underwriting profitability for the top 10 excluding GE Insurance Solutions, for which no underwriting result was available - declined sharply, with the previous year’s profit of $1.25bn falling to a loss of $10.1bn in 2005.