John McNamara from Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation is International General Insurance Holdings or IGI. IGI is a specialty insurer and reinsurer underwriting diversified commercial lines globally. The company is also a client of Three Part Advisors, so if you would like to meet with the company separately, just get in touch with me. We'd be happy to facilitate that. With us from the company are Waleed Jabsheh, President and CEO, and Robin Sidders, Head of IR. With that, I'll turn it over to Waleed.
Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. As John said, this is a presentation for IGIC, International General Insurance. My name is Waleed Jabsheh. I'm the President and CEO. I've been with the business from the day we started it back in 2002. Specialty insurer built essentially for long-term success and long-term value creation. It's a history built on a model of consistency, being consistent in the way we do business, being disciplined and managing what is a very cyclical environment or industry. Just give you a few points, a few minutes on the history. The Executive Chairman of the business, Wasef Jabsheh who happens to be my father, this is a family started business has been in the business for almost 60 years now in the insurance and reinsurance sector, predominantly out of the Middle East.
He has built companies throughout his career and decided to set IGI up almost a quarter of a century ago. At that point, I had been in the industry for a few years. I was working in Boston and then when he decided to set up IGI, I moved back to Jordan, which is where we started the operation. Very modest beginnings. Initially, $25 million of capital focused on a handful of lines of business. Commercial lines, what we call facultative lines, individually underwritten business. Very big focus on energy to begin with and all types of energy business. Offshore energy, onshore energy, power and renewables as well. In addition, we started off with construction engineering. We started off with commercial property, and we also were writing marine cargo and hull business as well.
I don't want to bore you with the gory details, fast-forward now 24 years, we're a global specialty insurer and reinsurer. As I said, we started with $25 million of capital where our equity base is now just under $700 million. That's without any of the returns to shareholders that we've distributed through various means. We started off with a handful of lines of business. We now write almost 25 different lines and sub-lines. I'll get onto that in a second. We started with one office. We now have eight offices soon to be nine all over the world situated, positioned in the geographical markets and the regional hubs that we are interested in. We've got offices in Asia. Our next office is going to be in India. We made an announcement earlier this week.
We've got a couple of offices in the Middle East, one in Dubai, one in Jordan, office in Africa and Morocco. Then you've got London as your underwriting hub and underwriting center. Europe is tackled with offices in Malta and Norway for their respective regions. Finally, we're a Bermudan entity domiciled in Bermuda. The holding company and the main risk-bearing parent are Bermudians, so we've got the office over there. We're 500 employees group wide. We started with a handful. If we just go back to the products, we categorize our products into three different segments: Long-tail, Short-tail, and Reinsurance. The history of the business has been on belief in diversification. You're going to hear me use that word a lot in the next 20, 25 minutes. Diversification is key.
What we've done is we've gone from a handful of lines to 25 different lines. From a mainly Middle East, Africa, Asia focused portfolio to a truly global portfolio. If I mention the product lines quickly within the Long-tail segment, one thing I have to be clear on is we don't write any U.S. liability business. We stay away from that out of appetite, not in focus whatsoever. Within that, it's more of a European, Middle Eastern, African book of business that is focused predominantly on professional indemnity, which is what over here better known as errors and omissions insurance followed by directors and officers, financial institutions business, and a bit of legal expenses and warranty indemnity. Long-tail book is about 25%, but that shifts depending on where we see the cycle. Short-tail lines, energy's still one of the biggest, especially combined.
Mentioned the variations of energy. Property as well is about $100 million book for us. Construction engineering is a big line. What we've done over the years, obviously, is add lines of business. We've added throughout the history a line of business on average every sort of 12- 18 months. Other lines within Short-tail include political violence, general aviation, contingency, marine lines. Within that is ports and terminals, marine liability, marine cargo. Finally, it's your reinsurance, which is your portfolio-driven coverages and protections. We transitioned to a public company back in 2020. If I can summarize it, the story has been one of very patient, methodical, step-by-step, disciplined, and 99% organic growth, which is essentially what the model is built on. The growth achieved deliberately without compromising any underwriting profitability, without compromising the bottom line and the strength of the bottom line.
That strength comes through the diversification, which I'll demonstrate as we go through some of the intricacies of a cycle. It's been a consistent execution story and a consistent value creation story throughout the company's 24-year history, which has allowed us to position ourselves in terms of performance easily in the top quartile of the industry and arguably in the top 10%, 15%. That is where I personally expect us to continue to be, regardless of where we are in the cycle. If we talk about the cycle, I'll just briefly go through what happens. The industry is inherently very cyclical and is predominantly the cycle and where we are throughout the cycle is impacted by events or driven by supply and demand. Obviously, loss activity is what also drives that.
You see within the cycle, the rating environment and adequacy of the rates move up and down. When you're in your euphoria stage, you're at the peak. You're exactly where you would love to be and continue to be at all times. The reality is not that, because the way the cycle works is when you are at the peak, everybody sees how well you're doing, everybody sees the returns, and everybody starts piling in. When they pile in, the way to build up a portfolio for themselves is to start undercutting and competing. More capital flows into the industry. Prices start coming down, down, bit by bit until you get to a level where it becomes inadequate. Unfortunately, the nature of our business is the decisions that you make today are not felt.
The ramifications of those decisions are not felt for at least a couple of years, and in some cases, a lot more than that, right? It takes time for markets to react, unless there is some sort of big event that has occurred. By the time you do, that capital starts pulling out and there's less supply of capacity. Normally, demand increases, and as a result, you're able to start pushing up your prices. There's less competition, and it just goes round and round and round. Ultimately, what drives it is results. When people are losing money, they start pulling out. They realize the mistakes that they've done.
By the time they get to euphoria and experience euphoria for a little bit, they forget the pain that happened in the crunch stage and revert to the same old mistakes that they've always done in the past. This is where that history I mentioned of discipline, focus, just protecting the quality, and the bottom line comes in. How do we manage the cycle? IGI, and I say this proudly and I say this in front of everybody and all investors that we What do you call it? If your measure of success of an insurance business is by its ability to grow top line year after year after year, then we are not your investment. Our focus and our priority is protecting the bottom line, underwriting to quality. Understanding the cycle.
If you understand the cycle, then you understand the competitive pressures and volatility that is inherent in our industry and in the cycle. You're able to react and mitigate and manage it. We maintain underwriting discipline throughout market conditions, regardless of where we are in the cycle. Focus on portfolio quality over portfolio growth. The opportunities will come. As we go through the cycle, the opportunities will present themselves and will come. You just got to be patient and not follow the market and let the competition pressure you to start doing things that you know are not right. Active portfolio management and continued diversification. You have to be cycle-aware, not cycle-driven. You've got to manage the cycle. You can't have the cycle manage you.
At the end of the day, discipline, consistency, pulling the right levers at the right time, that's where your diversification helps you. Shifting focus always to those areas that, what do you call it? That are perceived to be doing better. Know when to put your foot on the gas, know when to take it off. It's essentially growing at the right times, right? One of my favorite slides actually that we have in our quarterly investor decks and we mention in all our presentations and our meetings is this one specifically. If you just look at this, just go back to the history of 2013, so the last 10-12 years where you've been through a cycle and you've, what do you call it? You've gone through the good times and the bad and the tougher times.
If we just go back, I don't want to spend too much time because I can go on forever talking about this. If you just go back to 2014-2016 and 2017, you see very, very tough market conditions back then. Extremely difficult, extremely tough. You've got to keep in mind that IGI was a fraction, probably a third, maybe max 40% of the size that it is today when it had to tackle this soft market, right? 2014-2016, you saw some contraction in the portfolio. You have to be okay with that. As an insurance, as a reinsurance player, reinsurance business, you have to be okay with it. Honestly, it's not rocket science what we do, and I'll get into that in a minute. 2014, 2015, 2016, we bide our time.
2017 was the growth for us more on the Long-tail side when we started seeing the business and the market develop. You see there was a spike in the combined ratio back in 2017 because those were very heavy cat years. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and other cat losses globally. Market average combined ratio about 130% that year. We came in 105%, just going back to the top quartile, what do you call it? Comment I made earlier. In 2017, 2018, that's when you started to see the market harden. Okay. 25 different lines of business, global portfolio. Not everything is going to move in the same direction at the same time. That's where your diversification is so advantageous. You notice the light blue is the Long-tail segment. The dark blue is the Short- tail and the purple is the Reinsurance.
The hardening in 2018 and 2019 started in Long-tail. That's what we leaned on, right? We pushed hard in Long-tail. We were seeing rate increases, improving conditions, narrowing coverage, the likes of we haven't seen in 30 years or so. We pushed hard and you can see how from 2018, 2019 up to 2021, 2022, how much the light blue bar increased. Again, shifting focus to those areas where we think there's going to be the best opportunities and taking advantage. That's how you manage a cycle. Although you're in a hard market here, you're still managing the cycle. Cycle management is not about soft market. It's about the entire cycle. Then around 2021, it's the short-tail lines that you started seeing improving conditions on. You started seeing stability in the long-tail, so it flattened out for the next couple of years.
You see the dark blue bars increasing. Again, shifting focus. We saw the new opportunity is here. We moved into it. We also added new business lines. After COVID, we added contingency. Contingency is your event cancellation cover. COVID was your global cat loss for contingency. Completely obliterated the market. You knew there was going to be an opportunity. Within a year, we had an underwriter, a team being built out, and now it's a $35 million book that performs extremely well for us. We come to 2023. You'll see that the Long-tail market started softening. You see a shrinkage in the light blue bars. Stability in the Short-tail. Not much difference in the dark blue. In 2023, the Reinsurance market was turned topsy-turvy, upside down because of the poor results they've had for many years before that.
You can see how much the purple bars grew for us. Again, it's just shifting completely always. When we look at how we want to grow what our portfolio looks like or what it's going to look like, it's not about what you want it to look like. The market dictates what you want it to look like. Depends on how you react. You go after the best business where it is, and that's what 25 different lines of business and a global portfolio give you the ability to do, is pull the right levers at the right time, know when to put your foot on the gas, know when to take it off. Some of the differentiating factors of IGI also include, obviously, we're bottom line focused. We're not a top-line company. I'll scream it of the highest mountain so everybody is clear about that.
We have a single P&L across the group, nine offices. It's all on the same balance sheet. It's all the same capacity. It's all the same capital. We use our network to the group. Individuals within the company are rewarded based on group performance first and foremost. We work together as one team, one unit, to make sure we carry out and make decisions that are best for the group. It's a very flat management structure. Very flat structure completely, enabling access to people, quick decision-making. Instant access. My office as an example, it sits right in the middle of the underwriting floor. Everybody can walk in and out. There are no egos or anything like that. It's open, and our offices are all open floor plans. It's a very collaborative, very communicative culture and environment. As a family member, significant family ownership remains.
We still are the biggest shareholders in the business, upwards of 35%. The insider ownership is even decently, reasonably higher. That gives strong alignment with all shareholders as well. The one thing I want to emphasize is we are a long-term focused business. We never look at it as what we can achieve now, this quarter, next quarter, this year, or next year. The fact that the cycle is there tells you that your performance, and you should expect your performance to change based on where you are in the cycle. If you understand the business, you understand that comment. What we do, we don't give guidance. We say, "This is what we think we can achieve over a cycle." That's based on what we have achieved in the past.
Overall, we say we can deliver over a cycle, good and bad, average combined ratios in the mid-to-high 80%s, average ROEs in the low-to-mid teens. The last few years have been phenomenal for us. Our combined ratios have been in the high 70%s, low 80%s, and our ROEs have been in the low-to-mid 20%s. That is not the new normal, and that's where the understanding of the cycle comes. It's active capital management as well. We've always said we have a capital management, we have a buyback program, we have a dividend policy. We've always said it's headlined with the, what do you call it? Heading of underwriting first. That's our management policy, capital management policy. First and foremost, when the opportunities are there, we will deploy the money into the business, capitalize on the opportunities.
When the opportunities are not there to the extent that we need them with our current capital base, we've always said, and we always will, we'll give the capital back to shareholders. That could be in the form of dividends or, what do you call it? Share buybacks. So far, since we announced the capital management strategy, we've executed a $700 million share buyback program already. We're currently in the process of another five million share authorization, out of which we've completed about 20%. We've got ordinary dividends and special dividends, and special dividends are normally assessed at the end of the year following the results. We just earlier this year distributed $1.15, which was an increase on the $0.85 we did last year.
All of these things have helped us build the track record that we have built, have helped us achieve what we have achieved, and will continue to help us deliver. I think our global footprint is a competitive advantage, competitive strength, especially the way we do it. We combine local knowledge with technical expertise. I think that's a trick that some people get it wrong. Our people are our biggest asset, and our business is still very much a personal business. People in terms of relationships and people in terms of expertise. The diversification, again, I continue to harp on it because it's key. That diversification is strength. Diversification in our business lines, diversification in our geographical exposures, and diversity in our people. Having a global, essentially, network of offices.
I say this, every opportunity we get to continue and further that diversification in the right way, of course, we will take. It's a very disciplined capital management strategy, as we said. On the investment side, it's plain vanilla. Our approach to investment is we take risk on the underwriting side every day. We don't take risk on the investment side. It's a very plain vanilla, conservative, mainly fixed income, cash term deposit portfolio. In terms of the future, again, we're driven by the cycle. We can only influence maybe niche markets within certain countries. We're not big enough to be influencers. We're a rounding error to our larger competitors, wherever they may be. That for us is an advantage. We continue discipline to continue growth. We're as ambitious as any other company to grow.
We're out there fighting, looking, trying to capitalize on the opportunities that are out there. India is one, is a new venture for us, and we're working on a couple of other things that hopefully would come to fruition. Ultimately, we'll make the right decisions, we'll maintain that discipline, and ride the business only when it makes sense to us. You leverage wherever you see the opportunities. One of our advantages is our nimbleness, is our levers that we have to pull and our ability to go and access and pounce on business when we see fit. In closing, IGI was built as a business to perform across the cycle, not just in one stage of the cycle. We're long-term focused. We're not top-line driven. We're not in a rush. It's been a story of step-by-step, gradual, methodical growth.
It's taken us 24 years to build a $700 million business. Some of these new startups build that in their first year. That's the model, that's the appetite, that's the focus. It's not about size, it's not about speed. It's not a race. It's about building it and building it within your capabilities. That's one thing we always tell our people. Understand who we are as a business, understand what our capabilities are, set your risk appetite, set your risk tolerances, and be disciplined and you stick within them. Nobody is under pressure for top line. It's when you don't achieve bottom line that questions are asked. Ultimately, our goal is to create value, continue creating value, and that's a promise I give to you as long as I stand where I do. That's IGIC. Thank you very much. I'm happy to take any questions.
In your mind right now, where are you in that two by two square space? Where are you right now in this cycle as you compare to cycles in the past, and do you think the cycle will change because of AI and the ability to underwrite or to analyze differently than it has in the past?
Okay. In terms of where we are in the cycle, it varies by segment, it varies by line of business, right? That's what that diversity gives you. When some lines are not doing great, conditions are not cohesive for profitability, then you've got the optionality with other lines. What I would say is probably the Long-tail segment is probably in crunch. You've seen our book reduce for the last three years, and that's by design, of course. Whereas some of our Long-tail lines are probably in this space over here. It's a mixed bag in Short-tail lines, yeah. In terms of Reinsurance, you're probably in the middle of the green bit, the light green bit, but you're still at very adequate levels.
The Reinsurance market implemented a lot of significant and positive change back in 2023, 2024, you're still seeing that. It's more competitive on pricing now, but not so much in terms of structural changes. They've kept them, which is more important than the price. In terms of AI, I think for us as a business, in terms of the lines of business that we're involved in, you're talking about large commercial business portfolios. AI is an efficiency drive for us. It's not something that's going to start making underwriting decisions for you. Is it disruptive to us? Not as much, I would say, as it is for personal lines, SME, commercial, straightforward business. I think that's where the threat is more directed towards. In the future, what do you call it? Obviously, anything can go in any direction.
For us, it's about AI and how we're using it. I'll be clear, we're not pioneers in AI or driving AI in the industry or anything like that. We're happy for the others to spend the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, and we'll piggyback on some of the stuff that they do. It's efficiency, it's underwriting efficiency, operational efficiency, actuarial efficiency, finance, et cetera. Yes, sir.
You talked about being a minnow, so I want to know how you compete. I thought that it was the location that made the difference for you. Like you're underwriting in Jordan, in Africa, et cetera. Is that your comparative advantage?
That's one of them. Yeah.
Recently in with energy, for example, we've had a number of issues with the war in Iran. Can you tell us what the, well, I guess form of energy back to the marine, but even just regular energy. Are you seeing the market for insurance, for energy facilities being affected by the war?
The simple answer, no. The reason behind that is because of where we are in the cycle and the delusional thinking of some of the competition and its drive to I think it will come, but at the moment, we're not seeing that. Where we are seeing the huge reaction is on the political violence side. That's where losses arising from war would come out in terms of physical damage to energy facilities, et cetera. Marine-
You underwrite that.
Sorry?
You do political violence.
We do political violence. If you looked at our Q1 results, we did report losses from the war in Q1. That is now a very big opportunity business-wise, of course. Very big opportunity because where there's dislocation, where there's uncertainty, that's where the opportunity comes. The market has completely transformed for political violence, especially for the Middle East, given the political situation.
How did you on the competitive front, what makes you compete, or what makes you successful competing against such much larger carriers?
I think I said it before, it's very much a people business. It's the people, it's the expertise, it's the network, it's your capabilities, your ability to compete, service. At the end of the day, the business that we write, it's not like I'm taking it away from a Chubb or an AIG and taking it all to myself. No. A large energy account, I will take the piece, the bit that I can take myself. You'll have another 20, 30, 50 insurers and reinsurers participating and protecting that. It's a subscription market type situation, and that is the case in most of the lines of business. That's what makes the competition less. They still need you. Within the cycle, you cement your footprint in certain lines and certain geographies. Our local offices are 100% an advantage to us.
The way we use it, the way we use them, the way we manage them, those domestic markets are getting stronger and stronger. They have been for the last 20 years. If you're not in those local market boots on the ground, you're not seeing the spread of business that you should be-