Morning, everyone, and welcome to our earnings call, presenting the outcome of the 1st of January renewals 2025 of our P&C Treaty Reinsurance Group. And we also have given preliminary numbers, which will be also commented, but not in detail at this point in time. And today's speaker will be Jean-Jacques Henchoz, our CEO, and Sven Althoff, the Coordinator P&C Business. With that, I hand over to you, Jean-Jacques.
Thank you, Karl, and good morning, everyone. Before I comment on the January renewals, I'd like to express our sympathy to all the people affected by the disastrous wildfires in and around Los Angeles, to people who have lost relatives and friends or their homes and belongings. It's too early today to fully assess the size of this very significant loss in LA for the economy and its impact on insurance and reinsurance, but I'd like to give some indication on what this loss might mean for Hannover Re. Based on internal modeling and scenario analysis, and not a detailed bottom-up estimate yet, we would expect that an industry loss between $30 billion-$40 billion could result in a net loss between EUR 500 million and 700 million for Hannover Re.
This is enough to exceed our large loss budget of EUR 435 million for the first quarter, but the remaining budget for the full year and our balance sheet strength and retrocession program will enable us to absorb this loss and meet our guidance for the full year, which remains unchanged at around EUR 2.4 billion, as communicated in November. As an additional comment, in a scenario with an even higher insured market loss in LA, we would be well protected by our non-proportional whole account retrocession, and our market share would decline accordingly. Moving on now to our treaty business, I'd characterize the January 2025 round of renewals as orderly. Despite an increase in reinsurance capital and some competition on price, the supply in reinsurance capacity remained conditional to risk-adequate terms and conditions.
For Hannover Re, this prevailing attractive pricing environment provided opportunities to grow in line with our expectations. Furthermore, the January 25 renewals are the third consecutive renewal in a hard market environment, and the outcome for Hannover Re continues to support the strong quality of our P&C portfolio. Let me make a few general comments on the market environment. One important element in this market cycle is that we're not seeing any meaningful new inflow of capital entering the reinsurance space, not only during the year 2024, but also approaching the January 25 renewals. Still, the reinsurance capacity has grown, but this is mainly driven by retained earnings and a healthy level of profitability for most reinsurers. Demand for reinsurance increased as well, but less pronounced than anticipated, also as the inflationary pressure has eased compared to prior years. Reinsurance pricing varied by region and line of business.
We have observed some competitive pressure, most pronounced in property cat, where rate increases in the last two years have been most significant. For other property and specialty business, the pricing pressure was more moderate. I'd like to highlight that these developments were not across the board. Pricing stayed connected to loss experience and followed underlying changes in exposure. This is also true for casualty, where we've seen stable to slightly increasing reinsurance rates. Altogether, this confirms that the competitive environment continues to remain disciplined and rational. A further positive for our industry is the fact that competition was focused on price, while retention levels, as well as terms and conditions, remained broadly stable. Looking ahead, we expect the current market environment to prevail. The recent loss experience, particularly the LA wildfires, will very likely stabilize terms and conditions globally in 2025.
This brings me to the result of our January treaty renewals. Our strong client relationships and continued flight to quality resulted in favorable demand for Hannover Re's capacity. As explained, we continue to view the level of pricing as risk-adequate or better, providing opportunities to expand our market shares and broaden client relationships while maintaining our disciplined underwriting. For our traditional treaty portfolio, we recorded an average decrease of 2.1% in risk-adjusted prices with broadly stable terms and conditions. The price decrease for proportional business was a bit less pronounced than for non-proportional business. This brings the quality of the 2025 underwriting year broadly in line with a very good 2023 underwriting year and supports our combined ratio targets for the financial year 2025. Importantly, as stated earlier, reinsurance structures, retention levels, and terms and conditions remained mostly unchanged following the material shift which occurred in 2023.
The growth in premium volume of 7.6% is also fully in line with our target of at least 7% for the financial year 2025, which we expect to meet or exceed. Additionally, we recorded a continued high demand for structured reinsurance and ILS business, which is not a part of our reporting on the treaty renewals today. Last but not least, we have successfully renewed our retrocession program. The overall structure remains unchanged, as it provides adequate protection and enables us to manage earnings volatility this year. In line with our communicated plan, we have reduced the cession rate of our K quota share to 33%. As the capacity in the retro market was readily available, we have also used the opportunity to expand the covered regions and buy more limit for our non-proportional protection.
Overall, these developments are expected to contribute positively to our growth in net revenue and profits. Additionally, this leaves us well protected for the year 2025, with our risk appetite at the desired level and well positioned to benefit from attractive rates in property cat. So altogether, we're satisfied with the outcome of our renewals in January, both in terms of the quality and rate adequacy of our portfolio and the growth we were able to capture in an ongoing attractive market environment. This is the overall development of the renewal in a nutshell, and I'm now pleased to hand over to Sven, who will dive into the specific markets, regions, and segments.
Thank you, Jean-Jacques. Good morning also from my side. With EUR 10.25 billion, we have renewed 59% of our traditional reinsurance business at the 1st of January. This equates to 37% of our total P&C income. For some segments like the Americas and APEC, there are still significant parts still to be renewed later in the year, and later in the presentation, we will also give some qualitative comments on our structured and facultative reinsurance. On slide nine, you can see that overall, we could continue to grow in an attractive market environment. The premium increase of 7.6% fully supports our targets for the financial year 2025. For the entire portfolio, we are reporting a modest change in risk-adjusted pricing of minus 2.1% today. You can also see from the diagram that we remained disciplined in our underwriting approach, where we didn't see the profitability in the business.
We were willing to cancel some of our participations, and when it comes to pro rata in general, there was a slight reduction in our shares, given our view in terms and conditions. While on the excess of loss side, we were growing our shares slightly in the positive direction, from which you can see that we still feel that the non-proportional business is very attractively priced at, like Jean-Jacques already mentioned, mostly unchanged or even increasing retention levels and stable terms and conditions. We have seen negative price change for the entire portfolio, but to varying degrees. As you know, our portfolio is very well diversified.
Unlike the previous years, the growth in the Americas and EMEA was more pronounced compared to the other regions, where in the past, the growth was more diversified, again reflecting our view on the profitability that is achieved in the various markets, but overall, still at a very satisfying level. The price reduction on the proportional side, as Jean-Jacques already mentioned, was slightly less pronounced with -1.8%, while the non-proportional pricing saw a reduction of 2.8%. So from that point of view, we could defend the pricing level for the most part of the business at a very high level.
Overall, the growth in proportional business was a little more pronounced with 8.1%, which very often had to do with the good increase in underlying volume, which is indicating that most primary markets are still in a rating environment where terms and conditions are also stable or slightly increasing even. So from that point of view, there was a good tailwind in the underlying growth of our proportional business, while the premium change on the non-proportional side, which we are seeing in some of the segments, often had to do with repricing of the business after losses, where we did increase shares in order to take advantage of the attractive market environment.
Overall, we can say that despite the very sharply increased supply in some areas of the business, we were very pleased with the allocation of shares from our ceding companies, which is testament to the long-term partnership approach Hannover Re is having and very often us having the status of a preferred reinsurer in the client relationship. So from that point of view, it was a very positive outcome of the renewal that we could defend our positions in the programs. 2025 was the first year where we are showing an overall negative price development after seven years of improvement, but the price reductions were at a moderate level, and so the overall profitability of the business is still very healthy. Please remember on slide 12 that we are showing the movements in risk-adjusted rate increases for our non-proportional business, as reported at the time.
We are not going through the exercise on bringing them on par with our 2025 view on risk. Let me go into the details, starting with EMEA. 1st of January is a major renewal for the EMEA region. More than 80% of our business are renewing at the January date. We are seeing a price reduction very much in line with the overall portfolio. We had particularly pleasing growth in the region of 9.7% across the entire region.
This very much had to do with our strong position in Germany, where the insurance market is repricing some of their products and ceding companies giving us the opportunity to participate in this, but also reactions in pricing on loss-affected business in the Middle East after the flood events we had in 2024, but also Turkey, where we had the earthquake in 2023, which for this renewal triggered additional demand for capacity from the reinsurance market, which kept the pricing at a very attractive level. Like in EMEA, we can also show some significant growth in our Americas region with 13.5%. The growth was mainly organic from existing property and multi-line relationships. We saw some opportunities in the casualty space on a very selective basis to increase our positions, and we could also grow our portfolio in the insurtech space.
When it comes to casualty pricing, unlike the property business, we saw slight risk-adjusted rate increases at the first of January renewal, and as a reminder, we are talking about risk-adjusted rate increases, including our trend assumption when it comes, for example, to inflation. Property saw pressure from the increased supply of reinsurance capacity, particularly at the higher levels and on the parts of the portfolio which did not see any losses during 2024. On the other hand, our Canadian renewal was very positive with double-digit risk-adjusted rate increases, reacting to the series of losses which the market experienced in the third quarter of 2024. When it comes to Latin America, the renewal was mostly stable, and this was again on a high level, overall resulting in the positive development of our Americas portfolio. The picture in the APEC region was more of a mixed bag.
The overall price effect here was -2.7%. Depending on country-by-country analysis, we saw some opportunities, for example, in Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam, but we were more selective in places like China, overall resulting in a mostly flat development of our premium income. When it comes to our specialty products, January is a very meaningful renewal for our credit, surety, and political risk portfolio. We could slightly grow the book from 863 - 902 billion. The price effect was again slightly negative. We had a very organic renewal here. There was continued good demand from our ceding companies despite the high level of profitability in this segment over recent years, and there was only some level of increased retentions. Otherwise, the demand was very stable.
And in addition to the price effect, we also saw more stable underlying volume, which, of course, is a reflection of the lesser inflationary trend on turnover numbers, but still a growing part of our overall portfolio. In marine and aviation, the overall price impact was at - 1.7%. We decided to grow our market position in aviation slightly as the market had repriced that class of business very positively in recent years, and we saw additional demand from our ceding companies for Hannover Re Securities, so we took advantage on the aviation side. Marine was more disappointing. You will remember that we had the Baltimore Bridge loss during 2024, and the market was mostly stable rather than having more significant rate increases, which we were certainly hoping for.
So therefore, we saw no particular opportunities on the marine and energy side, and we had one ceding company reducing their cession in a meaningful pro rata contract, which overall for this segment resulted in a slight reduction of 6.2%. On the agricultural side, the business was renewing mostly flat at an attractive level. Particularly, the Brazilian market remained attractive following the drought in 2021, so we kept our position on those renewals mostly stable. We have slightly reduced our risk appetite for Chinese business as the terms and conditions were no longer fully meeting our view on risk-adequate pricing. So overall, some reduction in the premium income from the agricultural side, but there are also more renewals to come for the remainder of the year. And from that point of view, we stay optimistic when it comes to the agricultural class of business overall.
On the non-traditional part of our business, we had a very successful 1st of January renewal on our structured reinsurance business. There is continued strong demand for those solutions. There was some shift in the portfolio towards non-proportional covers, which, of course, is also a reflection on the higher level of retention levels in the traditional part of our portfolio, where we could offer alternative solutions on a more structured basis, and we could increase both the number of treaties significantly and also grow our premium volume written on a structured basis in the double-digit area, which is, in addition to the growth on the traditional business, further supporting our guidance of growth for the full 2025 year. On the facultative side, we are, of course, very much reflecting the development in many of the primary markets. The demand for our security continued to be strong.
Market conditions remained healthy despite mid-single-digit rate decreases on average. Where we see particular opportunities is on the topic of energy transition, CO2 transition, where we have become more active as part of the facultative portfolio in the line of engineering business. So therefore, overall, we are positive when it comes to the premium development of facultative, where we also expect the 2025 volume to be over and above the expiring 2024 book of business. And lastly, on the incoming business, on the net cat side, we already mentioned that on property, there was more pricing pressure when it comes to the terms and conditions. Overall, nonetheless, we can say that the business is still very adequately priced. Retention levels are stable or going up after losses, and overall terms and conditions are also broadly stable. So therefore, still a very attractive part in our portfolio.
The overall rate decrease in natural catastrophe excess of loss business was slightly higher with 5.4%, but nonetheless, we could increase our position on some of the programs in order to continue to accompany the growth of our ceding companies, and so from that point of view, a very positive outcome from an overall portfolio perspective on net cat despite the increased pressure on pricing. Last but not least for me, a few words about the renewal of our retrocessional protection. This went very much in line with our planning. As we have mentioned to you, on various occasions, we had the plan to reduce our proportional cession after two years of offering somewhat inflated participation to our investor base in order to give them accelerated payback opportunities.
We have now gone back to a more historic cession level of our K transaction, and we ended up in our sweet spot of 33%. We could have certainly placed more, but this was sufficient from a risk metric point of view and very successful in that sense. On the other hand, we were taking advantage of a more attractive pricing environment on non-proportional structures, very much in line with the incoming business. So therefore, we placed slightly more on our event whole account structure, but also on our aggregate tower, so that overall, in dollar terms, our retro buying was slightly up, but with some shift from proportional to more non-proportional cessions, which, of course, translates into less ceded premium overall, and with that, Jean-Jacques, I would hand over to you again.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Sven, for this overview.
Let me now move to our guidance for the financial year 2025. As the outcome of the renewals was in line with our expectations and our planning for the financial year 2025, there is no need at this stage to change the guidance. We have communicated to you in November last year. The prevailing strong quality of our P&C portfolio should bring us in a good position to deliver on the combined ratio target of below 88%. Due to the time lag in earning the underwriting year premium, the financial year 2025 will also benefit from the very strong quality of the underwriting in previous years, particularly 2024. For the group at net income, we aim to deliver around EUR 2.4 billion . As always, this net income expectation is under the proviso that incurred large losses remain within the 2025 budget of EUR 2.1 billion .
I already provided our initial view on the LA wildfire, which is not triggering any review of our targets for the full year. In summary, we're in a favorable position for 2025. The market environment remains supportive, and our earnings continue to grow. Let's now have a quick look at the preliminary figures for the financial year 2024. The full details will be disclosed during our next call on March the 13th, so this is really preliminary at this stage. We have achieved a group net income of slightly above EUR 2.3 billion, fully in line with our target updated in November. Furthermore, we've outperformed our growth target for reinsurance revenue of at least 5%. The operating performance in the fourth quarter remained strong. From the full year EBIT number of EUR 3.3 billion, in combination with the group net income, you can derive an above-average tax ratio in Q4.
The result of both business groups is based on a very solid underlying profitability, and the performance versus full year targets was favorable. With an EBIT of EUR 2.4 billion, the contribution from our P&C business is particularly strong compared to initial expectations. Altogether, we delivered on our group net income target and are well positioned to repeat this in the year 2025. With that, I close the presentation part, and we welcome your comments and questions. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star one on the telephone. We will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to move yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to enable loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star one at this time. And we have the first question coming from the line of Kamran, who's calling from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. The first question is just on the LA wildfires number that you've called out of 500- 700, obviously very preliminary, etc. Just want to really understand whether, I guess, compared to the 2018 number, this is a pretty significant increase. Just trying to understand whether the number you've talked about is gross, whether you're including retro, kind of any offsets maybe to that 500- 700 number. The second question is just around how this interacts with the guidance. Clearly, to me, the 500- 700 is a little bit bigger than I had anticipated, but you're still saying you're on track for the year. How should we think about the offsets?
Because you flagged the EUR 500 million-EUR 700 million versus the EUR 435 million Q1 large loss budget. Where are the things where you can do a little bit better than you'd expected when you put together the guidance? Is this just usual Hannover Re, Pandora's box of kind of a hoarded surplus that you can go into, or are there other things? Is this underlying margin being better than you'd expected? Thank you.
Yeah, let me start with your first question, Kamran. I mean, it's obviously difficult to compare this event with historic losses.
To begin with, the extent of the fires and the damage that was done by the fires is translating into significantly higher economic and insured loss compared to the fires we had in the 17/18 years, which, of course, then making non-proportional excess of loss protections from our ceding companies respond in a different manner compared to the historic losses where often, particularly in nationwide or super regional programs, the fires stayed below retention levels. And secondly, California was part of our portfolio, which grew in relation with the overall growth we have seen over the last five years.
The only part of our portfolio where we kept the growth at an underproportional level was really U.S. wind, which has more to do with absolute numbers because there's so much demand in U.S. wind that writing a similar market share would just produce very disproportionately high absolute exposure numbers, and that's what we are steering down. But California was a market where we were quite happy to just grow organically in the context of overall client relationships.
As to your broader question, Kamran, on the guidance, I think we remain very confident for a number of reasons. I think the first is the very strong earnings quality of our P&C portfolio. Secondly, certainly the retrocession program fits with our needs, and we have the K-Cession, but also non-proportional protection if there was a deterioration of the loss or further losses.
I think also I mentioned in the introduction that our large loss budget is above EUR 2 billion, so that gives us still leeway for the rest of the year. And last but not least, I think we're in a very strong balance sheet position. We have very solid resiliency reserves at the beginning of this year. So that gives us the necessary confidence to confirm the guidance and feel that despite the LA wildfires, we're well positioned. That would be the preliminary view as of today, Kamran.
Can I just circle back on, so I asked two parts in the first question. The first one of the parts was around whether the $500 million-$700 million is gross or net. I mean, in the past, you've often given numbers, not just talking about gross equals net. So I'm just interested in that as well.
Sorry, Kamran, I missed that. No, it is a net number.
Okay. Fantastic. Thanks, sir. And thanks, Jean-Jacques.
The next question comes from the line of Will Hardcastle from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. This is a really quick clarification, the first one on that. You just said it's a net number. I think also in your opening remarks, Jean-Jacques, there was something about the whole account quota share would help. Am I right in just thinking that if this loss were bigger than the EUR 40 billion or the assumptions you're making, essentially, that's the point where the whole account will dampen the quota share? So it's from this starting level.
The main question, though, is I don't know if I'm thinking about this right, but I'd have thought the capacity for the K-cession would have come down more than it has year on year in light of the retroceding going from the high 40s%, I think it was, to 33%. It's come down from about EUR 757 million- EUR 735 million. Are the only two offsets to that the additional geographies and the underlying growth? And if so, can you give us some more color on which geographies are now included that weren't last time? And when was the last time you were at this 33% K-Cession level? That would be helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you for those questions. When it comes to the wildfires, I mean, they are a covered peril under our K-Cession.
This is in play on the entire range that Jean-Jacques gave, and our excess of loss protection is coming in more towards the upper range that we mentioned. But it will come into play, which also means that if the losses are at the upper range or should go even higher, then we would have the situation where we can recover both from K and from whole accounts, which would mean that our net loss would then be not fully kept, but grow significantly slower than our gross numbers. That is the first question. The second part is you're spot on. I mean, the reason that the capital behind K is at a similar level compared to the previous years has to do with those two drivers, i.e., the increase in geographical scope of the cession and the underlying growth in the business.
When it comes to geographical scope, there are a number of factors where we can report that we had improvements in our portfolio. On K specifically, we have widened the particular coverage for our European exposures, where historically K was protecting the North European winter storm exposure. We now have all the perils included in K from a natural catastrophe point of view. On the non-proportional structures, the retro market bifurcated on event towers into peak versus non-peak coverage in 2023. We were now able to buy more on the traditional worldwide basis again. Of course, the aggregate structure is worldwide by its very nature. From that point of view, while the buying on K is down, the footprint has increased. On the non-proportional, we are more worldwide rather than peak versus non-peak.
That's great. Thanks so much.
The next question comes from the line of Darius Satkauskas from KBW. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. The first question, you mentioned selective growth opportunities in U.S. casualty. Can you specify what lines are these, how much did you grow, and is the exposure disposition inflation trends here, or is there some sort of immune segment? And then do you anticipate that the wildfire losses could lead to higher layer CAT re-rating in the U.S. renewals? It's been seeing pressure, but do you think that's going to change in those higher layers rather than the frequency stuff? And lastly, can you just clarify the EUR 500 million-700 million net loss? That's euros, right, even though the $30 billion-40 billion is dollars, if I'm correct? Thank you.
No, the last one, Darius, you're correct. Yeah, we haven't used the same currency. So the net loss range preliminary is in Europe.
Yeah. On your first two questions, Darius, let me start with casualty. In casualty, we did see slight rate adjusted increases. So from that point of view, the situation was slightly better compared to what we saw on the property side. We had an incoming portfolio where we didn't have any immediate need to achieve more than what was available in the market. So from that point of view, we were happy to renew what we had. And there were very, and I'm talking one or two, I'm not talking many, opportunities where we could or wanted to slightly increase our position on the program. And one client came new to the broker market, and we took the opportunity to write their casualty program for the first time. But as I said, I mean, I'm talking one or two opportunities.
So that's why we are talking about selective growth. The bulk of the business we just renewed at slightly improved terms and conditions. The impact from the California wildfires on the renewals later in the year, of course, remains to be seen. I mean, at this stage, we are working on the assumption that this will be an earnings rather than a capital situation for almost the entire market. So therefore, the surplus in capacity is not reduced because of the wildfires. On the other hand, we could experience a market which was reacting to losses also on the 1/1 renewals. So for example, the Canadian business had much improved terms and conditions after the losses in 2024. So from that point of view, I would expect that the wildfires will dampen the reductions in the renewals to come later in the year.
But that, of course, is speculation at this stage.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Jochen Schmitt from Metzler. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. I have two questions on the German GAAP account of Hannover Rück SE. How did net income and the equalization reserves develop in 2024? These are my questions. Thank you.
Sorry for that, but we will defer these questions to our call on the 13th of March. At this stage, we want to focus on the renewal. We're in the final touches of closing the numbers for 2024. So we take this on board, and when we meet again on the 13th of March, we'll make sure we respond to this question.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for your understanding.
The next question comes from the line of Roland Pfänder from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. First one is addressing your structured reinsurance business. You mentioned you had a very strong demand. Could you maybe share with us which solutions were in high demand for this business? And how is pricing developing there? Is it following the overall pricing cycle, so going down slightly, or is it more independent of what you see in the market? Second question regarding your new business volume. Could you share with us the split of what you contracted with existing clients and new clients? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Let me start with the second question. I don't have the exact split b ut the bulk of the increases in premium from new business definitely came from existing clients, which broadened their offering to us, and not from new business relationships, which was already a theme over the last renewals.
We are organically growing with our client relationships, and that continued to be the case in 2025 as well. When it comes to the structured business, in addition to the traditional solvency-related quota share demand, which we continue to have, and we are not seeing that demand going backwards, we had additional demand on non-proportional basis, multi-year, multi-class spread loss concepts all over the world, really. And this, as I said earlier, has to do with the increased retention levels of our ceding companies after the repricing of business in 2023. And clients are just interested to reduce their earnings volatility by buying those structures, which is helping them in more extreme frequency scenarios.
The margins are relatively independent of the movements in the traditional business because the competition here is really very often more other means of capital, and the motivation is rarely the risk transfer, but it's more capital management. And therefore, the situation on margins is more stable over the cycle in both directions, so it's also not hardening as much like the traditional business when we are in a positive cycle, but it's also not softening when we are in a negative cycle.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you very much. So my first question is just a broader follow-on on the LA fires, and you mentioned growth in California exposure. Was it not the messaging from yourselves and several insurers that so-called secondary perils exposure was being reduced over the years?
So I'm a bit surprised that this doesn't seem to have fully happened in California in this case. Could you comment on that, please? And second question is just on the retrocession better conditions noted. Could you help me quantify how much did they help on the 2.1 or -2.1% pricing? And last question is on EMEA, the -2.3% pricing. Would you say this was worse than you expected? Because there's been loss experiences, there's been motor prices, significant increases in the primary side at least. So I'm just curious on these three points, please. Secondary perils, retrocession, effect, and EMEA pricing. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Vinit. Let me start with the EMEA question. For most of the business, the renewal went more or less as expected.
So some positive developments, for example, when it comes to German motor business and also reacting well after the flood events in the Middle East. The one area where the increase in prices certainly stayed below our original assumptions was on the European flood-related CAT business, where we did see some level of rate increase, but not to an extent that we were originally hoping for. So from that point of view, not that many surprises. Market reacted rationally for the most part, but European flood could have done better, would be my summary. When it comes to your secondary perils question, I mean, we've always highlighted that we are prepared to increase our risk-taking on the CAT side in line with the general growth of the company, which has been significant over the recent years, as you know. So that's exactly the situation in California.
We have not grown disproportionate, but we have supported the growth of our client base in line with our proportionate growth. The only area, as I mentioned before, which we have really steered actively down in a disproportionate way is U.S. wind. On all the other perils, we have grown in absolute numbers, which doesn't mean, Vinit, that we have a particularly high market share in California when it comes to wildfire. If you compare our net numbers with Jean-Jacques gave with the market loss, I mean, this is still a relatively modest market share number compared to where we are across our entire portfolio. So from that point of view, no surprise, at least on our end, when it comes to that question.
On the retro side, I would say the way I would put it, if you compare our combined ratio or combined ratio guidance last year with this year, you know that we now have a combined ratio target of below 88%, whereas it was a percentage point higher compared to last year. The two main drivers here, why we do have the one percentage point lower, is the lesser purchase of retro. The other reason has to do with the earning pattern of our premium. As you will remember, we have always guided that it takes three financial years to fully earn an underwriting year. Therefore, the 2022 underwriting year is now more or less dropping out of our earning pattern. We are now earning the premium from the very attractive years 2023, 2024, 2025.
So that would be the second driver of the lower combined ratio target. And thirdly, your question, how does that change with the -2.1% rate reduction? This is a touch higher compared to our original assumption when we reflected on our combined ratio guidance, but only really a touch higher than original expectations. And therefore, the difference is too small to really have an impact on our overall guidance.
Okay. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thank you so much. I had two questions. The first one is on Q4. You kind of said the taxes higher and non-life was the EUR 2.4 billion EBIT was very strong. I just wondered if you can talk a little bit about the tax. I suppose what I really want to know is how much you added to the business. So you can't tell me that, I think, asking in a slightly different way. And the other question is... actually, no, that's all I have. Sorry.
No, thank you, Michael. On tax, we will come back to this when we present the final numbers for 2024. But in short, you know that there's a global tax regime which has been put in place and has affected the tax rates of some jurisdictions, and this is the main driver for that. Historically speaking, we're roughly around 25% tax rate, globalized view, and that's where we stand, roughly speaking. But we'll give you more granularity when we meet again and present the 2024 results in more detail.
Yeah. The same is very much true on the resiliency side. So we will have an internal view, which we will share with you in our March call. And we should have the external view when we are reporting in May.
Good. And Michael, just to make sure you have the understanding, there's some higher tax provisions in there. So we'll give you more precision. But at Q4, we have some conservative tax provisions, which explain that Q4 movement. So nothing unusual, but more on this at our next call.
Super. Thank you.
We have a follow-up question coming from the line of Will Hardcastle from UBS. Please go ahead.
Well, thanks very much. I think they're both quick. Can you give us an idea of the casualty risk-adjusted pricing that you're saying is up, split between headline price and assumed loss trend? You mentioned it's over and above that loss trend. And then the second one is, is it possible to give us what the current ultimate loss assumption is for those 2017, 2018 wildfires relative to the initial reported? So I'm just thinking about after subrogation impacts. Thank you.
Well, we have to come back to you on the second question. I don't have that readily available. So please bear with us on that side. On the casualty, it's one to two percentage points positive from a risk-adjusted rate increase point of view. And as you will remember from previous presentations, we are using quite a variety of segmentation in U.S. casualty depending on what exactly is it. So I don't have a general answer for you when it comes to trend assumptions here.
We have another follow-up question coming from the line of Kamran Hossain from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hi. Really quick follow-up from me. Just on the gross net for the wildfires, it's really interesting in kind of whether you had a pretty big help from the retro or not. Just interested in kind of thinking about what this means for the market going forward, whether the retro markets had a pretty big shock from this too. So any color or kind of qualitative comments on whether you had a big benefit from retro or not on your EUR 500 million-700 million net loss would be helpful. Thank you.
The way I would put it, Kamran, is we have some help from the retro protection. Obviously, our K facility is first dollar. So once there's a loss into the ceded business, then we can directly recover from K. At the lower end of the range, that is our main protection. The higher the loss gets, the more our vertical event protection is coming into play. But at the upper end of the range, which Jean-Jacques has mentioned, we are in the program, but by no means through our program. So there would still be some way to go. So from that point of view, I would say, yeah, some help from the retrocessional protection on the wildfires, but not significant.
Well, that's it. Thank you, sir.
We have another follow-up question coming from the line of Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
I have two. That'd be really quick. I think you're the only reinsurer of German motor. So any view on how the renewal there shapes up? Sorry about this. And the second is on the EUR 2.1 billion net CAT budget. I had initially thought it would be EUR 2 billion. The extra EUR 0.1 billion versus me, so not just you, so it's a funny question. Is it coming from an updated view of wildfire risk?
Yeah. On the budget side, our budget for major losses for the year is EUR 2.1 billion. That is split EUR 1.7 billion for natural catastrophe-related losses and EUR 400 million for manmade-related losses. That view hasn't changed. So that is still the budget. And there was no change in budget assumption after the wildfires. What Jean-Jacques was saying is, despite us being over and above the EUR 435 million, which is the risk-adjusted part of EUR 2.1 billion, we are still of the opinion that we will be able to meet our guidance. But that has to do more with balance sheet strength and the fact that it's early in the year rather than us now changing the budget for the year, if that makes sense.
And then on your first question, we are writing both a proportional and a non-proportional German motor business, given the fact that, on average at least, motor insurance at the primary level was not profitable, also not in 2024. We know that there were further rate increases at the ceding company level. As we are writing a proportional book, we are then directly participating in those further rate increases. Most clients kept their reinsurance buying stable. But there were also some shifting from proportional business to non-proportional buying. But given the actions taken by our ceding companies, we were happy to engage on both sides, i.e., both on proportional and non-proportional business in German motor.
Very helpful. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star [one] and turn on your telephone. We have another follow-up question coming from the line of Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. Vinit f rom Mediobanca, I just wanted to quickly clarify. You said to me that your growth in California was supported by the client or insurer growth. I mean, isn't it a big picture truth that many insurers were withdrawing from California home insurance? And of course, yet we have such a high insured loss. But I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on this trend that we've been reading from the outside, that California is seeing less and less insurance selling or protection sold in the primary lines. And then again, we have this kind of a huge loss. And of course, your share or any comment on that would be very insightful. Thank you.
Yeah. We really have both, Vinit. I mean, we certainly have exposure and losses coming from clients where we have a global or nationwide relationship. So it's not all about California-specific clients. But as I said, we have both. We also have some California-specific exposure. This is maybe different compared to Florida, where given the sheer size of our U.S. wind exposure, we are avoiding the Florida specifics. We are prepared to also engage in California-specific programs, which for us is, in the overall global context of natural catastrophe business, attractive from a diversification point of view. Whereas for Florida specifics, this would mean growing into our peak peril. And that's why we are not doing it in Florida. But in California, we do it from time to time.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. No more questions at this time.
Well, thank you very much again for your attention. I hope we managed to address all your questions. Key messages for us was that we're satisfied with the general renewals. We see, broadly speaking, stable terms and conditions, retentions. And as discussed, a slight decline in rate adequacy, but still in very good territory. So we're confident about the outlook for 2025. Certainly, there's a big loss in LA in Q1. But we're very confident about the full year and therefore confirm our guidance. The next call, as mentioned, will be on the 13th of March. And this will be an opportunity for a quick update on the latest developments, but a focus on the final numbers for 2024. With that, I close the call. And thank you all for your attention.