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Kuwait Insurance Report Q4 2008
Business Monitor International, Dec 2008, Pages: 63
The Kuwait Insurance Report provides independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Kuwait's insurance industry.
The Insurance Report has been written at a time that the global financial crisis, which arose as a result of the evaporation of inter-bank liquidity, appeared to be moving towards a resolution. The governments of the UK, the US and most of the larger countries in the euro area have all announced plans to make funds available, in one form or another, to their respective commercial banking sectors. As yet, it is too early to identify the impact of the crisis on individual emerging markets. However, in a later section of the report, we include a lengthy essay that attempts to identify the key issues, and describes key changes to our analysis of the sector. In essence, commercial banks and insurers in the emerging markets (and, indeed, the developed countries) of the Asia-Pacific region appear to be well placed to deal with the crisis. The same is broadly true of commercial banks and insurers in the various countries of the Middle East and North Africa. In Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia appear better placed than Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In Africa, South Africa’s situation appears to have much in common with that of Brazil, however by contrast, Nigeria faces some of the same challenges as those that confront Venezuela. At the more negative end of the spectrum, banks and insurers in most countries in Central and Eastern Europe are in far from robust positions.
It has not been practicable for us to collate the latest figures for assets and premium income this quarter. The global financial situation has been changing so rapidly that most figures would have become out of date. Regardless of this, we expect that in coming months it will become obvious that credit growth is slowing dramatically in the countries included in the commercial banking sector profiles. We will amend the figures, and indeed our forecasts, accordingly.
Nevertheless we believe figures compiled last quarter provide insights as to how the various insurance sectors will fare in the current, extremely uncertain environment. We have therefore left them, and comments in the Key Issues section of the report essentially unchanged.
The global financial crisis is likely to affect the various segments of the global insurance industry in different ways. In many countries, especially in Europe, the coming recession points to softness in the non-life segment. In many cases, numbers of policies may fall and there should be downwards pressure on premiums. By contrast, the main problem for the life segment in almost every country is the extreme volatility of financial markets. Over the longer-term however, the fortunes of life insurance will likely recover thanks to the secular growth of organised savings in most countries. China - where the larger insurance companies continue to achieve double digit growth in premium income - is a good example of this. Some particular niches should also do well in the current environment, such as legal liability insurance.
In the Middle East and North Africa, we profile 17 companies. These are AGF, AIG, Allianz, Aviva, AXA, Cardif, ERGO, Eureko, Fortis, Generali, Groupama, HSBC Insurance, Liberty Mutual, MAPFRE, RSA, UNIQA and Zurich Financial Services.
We also look at a number of the smaller local firms that are active in the region, particularly in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
For almost all the countries whose reports we are updating, we are also able to include actual data for calendar 2007: this was not the case for our Q208 reports.
In 2007, total premiums in Kuwait rose by 1% to KWD178mn. Non-life premiums rose by 1% to KWD128mn, while life premiums rose by less than 1% to KWD50mn.
We expect that annual non-life premiums will grow by KWD185mn between now and the end of the forecast period, while annual life premiums should increase by KWD42mn. Growth in non-life premiums should be driven by the general growth in nominal GDP plus a rise in Non-life penetration from the current level of 0.43% to 1.00%. Growth in life premiums should be driven by the change in the overall population and a rise in life density from US$57.66 to US$90.00 per capita. The Insurance Business Environment Rating is 44.3.
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