2 months ago
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The Caribbean region suffered an estimated US$500-million loss in insured property damage as a result of Hurricane Beryl, according to the head of Guardian Holdings Limited, GHL, a leading insurance company in the region.
GHL Group CEO Ian Chinapoo said that his company took a hit of US$48 million before payment from reinsurers as a result of Beryl, a deadly and destructive Category 5 hurricane that impacted parts of the Caribbean, before wrecking further damage in Mexico and the United States in late June and early July.
However, reinsurers are expected to cover around four-fifths of the loss.
“For the industry, the estimate from our main brokerage partners across the region is a gross potential loss of about US$500 million. Guardian is estimating, for our book, US$48 million gross, which is before our reinsurance. Net of reinsurance, our potential maximum loss, or expense, is US$10 million,” Chinapoo said during the NCB Financial Group’s investor briefing last Friday to report on the company’s third-quarter performance.
For the quarter, the financial conglomerate made a profit of $7.39 billion, up from restated profit of $4.87 billion in the June 2024 period.
NCB did not declare a dividend, but said the payment of an interim distribution would be considered at a board meeting set for Friday, August 16.
GHL is majority-owned by NCB Financial. The Trinidad-based insurance conglomerate operates in 21 countries in the Caribbean.
Chinapoo cautioned that the hurricane damage estimates were preliminary, as claims were still being processed by the company.
“We are working very hard to get the claims settled very quickly, given the impact on our customers and on the countries; so we are expecting that to be concluded within the months of August and September,” he said.
Total devastation
On July 1, Beryl made landfall on the island of Carriacou in Grenada as a high-end Category 4 hurricane, causing total devastation. The hurricane intensified further as it entered the Caribbean Sea, peaking as a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour, before slowly weakening over the next few days due to wind shear as it passed south of Jamaica on July 3, and then the Cayman Islands.
In Jamaica, GHL operates life insurance company Guardian Life and general insurer Guardian General Insurance.
Guardian Life is also invested in property development. Chinapoo disclosed that 47 units out of Guardian’s slow-moving 150-unit Cambridge luxury apartment complex in New Kingston remain to be sold.
Seven units were sold recently and upgrades were currently being done on the development before another sales blitz would be undertaken, he said.
“We do expect to have many more units sold before the end of the year,” Chinapoo said.
Over nine months to June, NCB Financial Group, which has assets of $2.27 trillion, made net profit of $21 billion, which doubled its prior year’s restated profit of US$11.8 billion.
The financial impact of Beryl on NCB Financial should start showing up in the company’s results in the July-September quarter.
NCB Financial is already experiencing tightness in the insurance segment of its operations. Chief Financial Officer Malcolm Sadler reported that while net insurance revenue improved, it “was offset by higher net expenses from reinsurance contracts held mainly from the property portfolio, due to tightening of the reinsurance markets”.
English (US) ·