PARIS (Reuters) -French insurer Axa on Thursday posted a 2% rise in revenue, with strength in its health and casualty insurance business offsetting weakness in savings.
Europe’s second-biggest insurer, behind Allianz, said it was confident of reaching its financial targets for 2023 despite geopolitical tensions linked to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“We currently expect the net underwriting losses from the crisis to be akin to a mid-sized natural catastrophe event,” Axa’s CFO Alban de Mailly Nesle told reporters but declined to elaborate.
The company in February raised its goals saying it was expecting underlying earnings per share to grow at the high end of its 3% to 7% target range by 2023, and cumulative cash to exceed its targeted 14 billion euros ($14.71 billion) during 2021 to 2023.
De Mailly Nesle said it was currently too early to provide a precise guidance regarding the impact of the war on earnings as the insurer stopped underwriting new insurance business and all renewals concerning Russian-owned assets located in the country.
($1 = 0.9520 euros)
(Reporting by Matthieu Protard; Editing by Jan Harvey and Susan Fenton)
