Vienna Insurance Group

As a market leader in Austria and the CEE region, Vienna Insurance Group with its more than 25,000 employees is in an excellent position to take advantage of the opportunities available in this region and the long-term growth options they offer. VIG remains committed to its proven business strategy of profitable growth. Based on VIG’s values of diversity, customer proximity and responsibility, the Group plans to use its successful management principles to consolidate and further increase its market share. This includes both organic growth and growth by acquisitions, particularly if an opportunity arises to strategically expand the existing portfolio or take advantage of economies of scale. Vienna Insurance Group has set itself a goal of increasing its market share to a minimum of 10% in Poland, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia in the medium term. This goal was already achieved in one of these countries, Serbia, in 2016 as the result of an acquisition. VIG’s acquisition of Gothaer TU raised its market share to around 9% in Poland.

The strategic measures and initiatives set by the Agenda 2020 work programme – business model optimisation, organisation and cooperation and ensuring future viability –helped accelerate the development of the Group in 2018. The Group continues to focus on efficiency improvements and making use of synergies, and is working systematically to reduce both losses and expenses in order to improve its combined ratio. In life insurance, efforts will also be made to further promote biometric risk coverage and the regular premium business.

For 2019, VIG plans to steadily grow its Group premium volume to EUR 9.9 billion and its result before taxes (including non-controlling interests) to between EUR 500 to 520 million. Based on current conditions and the positive macroeconomic development of the region, Vienna Insurance Group aims to continuously increase premiums to more than EUR 10.2 billion by 2020 and achieve a result before taxes (including non-controlling interests) in the range of EUR 530 to 550 million. For the combined ratio, VIG expects a sustainable improvement to around 95% by 2020.

Based on the feedback received from the investor survey in the summer of 2018, Management decided to implement a new dividend policy. The new policy is to distribute a dividend in the range of 30 to 50% of Group net profits. The goal is to continue aligning the dividend per share to the company’s earnings performance.