Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Susan Spivak of Wachovia.
Susan Spivak - Wachovia Capital Markets
I was hoping you could go into a little bit more detail about your diversification and the strategy and just an update as to which lines that you’ll be in and how far away from the traditional property CAT business you think you’ll be in by year-end.
Mark Byrne
Sure that’s fine, I’ll respond to that. This is Mark speaking.
I would expect that our medium term goal is to see the property CAT component of what we do go to about 50%: it’s about 68% today and it was probably 95% in our first six months of operation so, we’re moving that meter about 10 points a year I would say.
We always knew it would take longer to build the non-CAT business than the CAT business and so we’re satisfied with that progress and obviously we’re not going to do anything to achieve for that 50-50 mix, but I would expect that that’s about where the balance will seem best to us, because the property CAT business remains on a pure ROE basis, probably the best price business we can write, and at the same time it’s also obviously the most volatile business we can write.
So, we think that roughly a balance between the CAT and the non-CAT is going to be the appropriate mix for us for the long run.
This year, Guy Swain who is with me today and his team in Switzerland got off to a great start. I guess I would forecast that we might see the business written in Switzerland, all of which is non-CAT, comprise something like 18% to 20% of our total this year and that’s up from just about nowhere a year ago, so that’s quite good progress.
Our Dubois office is off to a very nice start. We were licensed in September of last year and we saw about 90 opportunities before the end of last year.
We’re very pleased with our operations in Puerto Rico, where we have two strong, experienced underwriters on the ground, looking at Latin America, South America and Spanish speaking Caribbean business for us.
We think we have a couple of different angles on diversification: the first one being getting globally diversified with the CAT book. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I think all of you know we have less of an emphasis on Florida, and the Gulf, and the US in general, that just about any company you would cover in Bermuda. I think the US represents about 35% to 45% of our overall business today and not all of that is CAT.
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