Allianz estimates Sandy losses at $590 million

Munich-based financial services giant Allianz is estimating its losses from October’s superstorm Sandy to be $590 million, a preliminary figure that includes payments to customers and related items such as reinsurance reinstatement fees.

“Despite the impact of Hurricane Sandy, we continue to expect our operating profit for 2012 to exceed 9 billion euros,” Dieter Wemmer, CFO of Allianz SE said in a company release.

Last week, Fitch Ratings estimated that the insurance industry would see losses of $20 billion or more from the storm. Those losses were proportionally larger in commercial lines, the company said. 

“In nearly all cases, Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the favorable spread of loss and limited concentration risk among individual insurance companies resulting in manageable losses to insurers,” Fitch noted in a statement. “However, despite robust modeling available for the Northeast U.S., there were several areas related to flooding risk exposure that the models did not fully capture and companies did not fully anticipate.”