Article

A YEAR WITH A NEW NAME

Russian Policy, no.8, August, 2007

«Unity Re» brand is about one year old. The company has passed the reorganization stage and stabled its position as one of the most active players in Russia & CIS reinsurance market. International business development is a strategic goal for the future.

For 2006-2007, Unity Re has been finally formed as the reinsurance core of Group RESO. In the autamn 2006, just after the rebranding from RESO Re into Unity Re the significant reengineering was implemented. It touched the business processing, strategic planning and HR. The number of employees increased by twice – up to sixteen people who form the underwriting, development and operational divisions of the company. Such structure allows focusing on more efficient meeting the partners’ needs without a decay in underwriting quality and attitude.

The result of such reconstruction – Unity Re has tightly gripped the position of one of the largest and most active reinsurers in the market with growing business in non-life sector. For 2006 Unity Re wrote over 587 million RUR of premium. As compared with 2005 it is twice as high growth. Claims paid amounted for about 35 million RUR while the largest ones related to North Korea heavy rains losses during summer 2006 and a number of large fire claims in Russian market.

Underlining the results of the first half 2007, the same dynamics could be predicted for the whole year. It is observed through not only the NPW rise but also through the number of written accounts (increase from 1480 for 2005 to 3017 for 2006 and the doubling of this quantity just for 6 months of 2007). Here, the list of Unity Re’s permanent partners is stably growing and nowdays amounts over 300 companies. All insurance market leaders of Russia and CIS and local and international brokers are among them .

The priority goals for 2006-2007 were the strong development of cooperation with brokers and approaching the international reinsurance market. Though 90% of Unity Re’s portfolio is Russia & CIS business, the share of risks from Arabian region, South-East Asia and South America is constantly growing.

In conjuction with this trend, for 2005-2006 Unity Re managed to form a balanced and diversified inward portfolio the core of which is the large property accounts from commercial, industrial and energy sectors. Together with small and medium-sized property business they form over 80% of portfolio; marine business is about 10%; the rest is motor, accident & health, aviation and casualty. The effective and reliable performance of Unity Re is still backed by own financial resources (where the basis is the paid-up capital that is the largest among the professional reinsurers in the market – 300 million RUR) as well as by qualitative non-life treaty line with indirect sections provided by RESO-Garantiya and making Unity Re one of the largest Russian reinsurers.