صنعت بیمه درایران-سه ماهه سوم2011

Key Insights And Key Risks

 Iran’s insurance sector is substantial and has shown that it can develop, if not thrive, despite the lack of access to global markets.

However, it is not growing in real terms. Unlike in most countries, ‘liberalisation’ and ‘privatisation’ are processes that are unhelpful for most insurance companies.

Iranian households have no incentive to use life insurance and there is no sign that this is going
to alter any time soon.

The sector has huge potential – but this is most unlikely to be realised unless there is wholesale
political change.

Iran’s insurance sector has a number of strengths, including scale in terms of gross written premiums per annum. Bimeh Iran, the largest company that is a state-owned enterprise, is one of the largest underwriters in the Middle East and would rate as a reasonably large insurer in most countries. Non-life penetration has consistently remained slightly above 1% of GDP. Among other things, this suggests the regulatory regime is reasonably sound. Iran’s insurers have managed to survive in the face of various challenges – not least of which is the almost complete lack of access to the global reinsurance markets. Unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, Iran’s insurance sector does not consist of a surprisingly largenumber of sub-scale non-life companies that are offshoots of local business interests that do not have a clear edge in the industry.

The sector is undergoing ‘privatisation’, via listings of companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange, and ‘liberalisation’, in that the decisions over products and pricing are moving from Bimeh Markazi Iran (the regulator and, to a certain extent, provider of reinsurance service) to the insurers themselves. However, in contrast to privatisation in other countries, the deals in Iran are not necessarily reducing government control and are certainly not increasing formerly state-owned companies’ access to capital. The limited data that is available suggests the main impact of ‘liberalisation’ is to transfer resources from shareholders of private sector companies (including the recently ‘privatised’ Bimeh Alborz, Bimeh Asia and Bimeh Dana) to the still state-controlled Bimeh Iran, employees and, to a certain extent, insurance customers.

High inflation in Iran distorts the insurance sector in two ways. It obscures the fact that in real terms insurance has hardly been growing. It also provides a major disincentive for the many Iranian households that have significant savings to use life insurance, which hardly exists in the country.