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Company portrait
About us
With gross premium of more than EUR 16 billion we are the third-largest reinsurer in the world. We transact all lines of property & casualty and life & health reinsurance and are present on all continents with roughly 2,900 staff. We can look back on over 50 successful years in the reinsurance business. Established in 1966, our Group today has a network of more than 100 subsidiaries, branches and representative offices worldwide. Our subsidiary
The rating agencies most relevant to the insurance industry have awarded both Hannover Re and
The strategy pursued in both property & casualty and life & health reinsurance supports our overriding vision: "Long-term success in a competitive business". Our profit and growth targets are pivotal to the Group strategy. Profitability and value creation are the foundations of our sustainable development in the interests of our clients, shareholders, employees and business partners. With this in mind, our goal is to achieve economic success while at the same time acting in accordance with the needs of our staff and the company and giving due consideration to protection of the environment and conservation of natural resources. The targets set are regularly analysed and adjusted as necessary according to a three-year cycle. Non-financial targets are specified in concrete terms in, inter alia, the sustainability strategy.
Our integrated enterprise management system Performance Excellence 2.0 supports us in the accomplishment of our strategic objectives. In this regard, each organisational unit defines its own contribution to the Group strategy. In this way we ensure that all initiatives and measures within our company are rigorously linked to our Group strategy.
We generate competitive advantages to the benefit of our clients and shareholders by conducting our insurance business with the lowest administrative expenses in our industry. This is made possible by, among other things, lean organisational structures, a uniform global IT infrastructure, centralised underwriting in property and casualty reinsurance, the efficient allocation of capital and the use of hybrid capital in order to optimise our cost of capital. In this way we deliver above-average profitability while at the same time being able to offer our customers reinsurance protection on competitive terms.
Guided by a clearly defined risk appetite, our risk management steers the company so as to be able to act on business opportunities while securing our financial strength on a lasting basis.
In view of the fact that we assume reinsurance risks with largely little or no correlation across all lines of our Property & Casualty and Life & Health reinsurance business groups and thanks to our global presence, we achieve broad diversification and hence an efficient risk balance. In conjunction with our capital management, this is the key to our comparatively low cost of capital.
We transact primary insurance in selected market niches as a complement to our core reinsurance activities. In this context, we always work together with partners from the primary insurance sector.