Insurance amid calamity

Misfortunes never come singly. That’s one big misfortune for companies that sell insurance against misfortunes. Non-life insurance players in Pakistan are in a tight spot. Calamities have struck their clients one after another, triggering insurance events — occurrences that result in insurance providers paying out on a claim. Premiums should go up correspondingly. Yet their clients refuse to loosen their purse strings as they, too, get squeezed by decades-high inflation and unending political uncertainty. “Big losses have happened in our market. One big name in textile, one big name in paper manufacturing, one big name in engineering. They’ve all come in a rapid succession in the last year and a half. Premiums are in distress,” said Muhammad Aminuddin, CEO of TPL Insurance Ltd, a listed non-life insurer that wrote gross premiums of Rs1.8 billion in the first half of 2022, up 31.7 per cent from a year ago.