MAPFRE maintains its leadership position in Non-Life insurance in Latin America

• It leads by a wide margin, with a market share of 6.5% and 5.6 billion dollars in premiums.
• The region’s insurance market grew by just 0.2% while the Non-Life business remained solid.

The Latin American insurance industry’s premium volume grew by just 0.2% in 2020, to 153.4 billion dollars, as a result of the depreciation of some currencies in the region and the impact of the pandemic, which hindered the upward trend of the business in the last decade. This is clear from the Ranking of Insurance Groups in Latin America drawn up by MAPFRE Economics and published by Fundación MAPFRE. The Non-Life business, which showed positive performance in 2020 with growth of 3.9%, could not offset the slowdown in premium volume growth in the Life business line of 4.1%.

In this context, the region’s two largest insurance markets, those of Mexico and Brazil, experienced premium stagnation in 2020. For the former, growth was a mere 0.2% (compared to 11.1% in 2019) and, for the latter, there was a slowdown in nominal growth (1.1% compared to 11.4% in 2019). The MAPFRE Economics report explained that “Apart from Chile, Panama, Ecuador and Peru, the other insurance markets in the region performed positively in 2020, with a nominal increase in local currency of 56.9% in Argentina and 12.1% in Uruguay”.

With respect to the overall ranking, the 25 largest insurance groups included in the ranking recorded a 458.6-million-dollar drop in premiums in 2020, a decrease of -0.5% compared to the previous year’s sample. The Brazilian group Brasilprev tops the ranking (Life and Non-Life business). With a market share of 6.1%, this year it passed Bradesco, whose share dropped to 5.8% (compared to 6.6% in 2019).

MAPFRE is ranked fourth in the region. However, MAPFRE maintains its leadership position in the Non-Life business line by a wide margin, with a market share of 6.5% and 5.59 billion dollars in premiums, well ahead of the US insurer Innovacare’s 3.68 billion and Triple-S’s 3.58 billion, which hold second and third place in this ranking, respectively. These two companies are monoline carriers in the health line, and they appear in the Non-Life segment for the purposes of comparability of this report.