Victor Peignet, chief executive officer of SCOR Global P&C, said in a statement, "The performance at the Jan. 1 renewals comforts us in our projection of a net combined ratio for 2010 trending toward 96 percent."

Mr. Peignet told National Underwriter in an interview, "Basically, we are quite pleased with the outcome of the renewal. What we are seeing from the figures of the renewal is that we achieved basically what we had in mind."

He noted, "First of all, we can see that the business we booked on Jan. 1 is having an expected profitability that is better than the business we booked at Jan. 1 2009 by about 3 points of underwriting ratio, which is sizable."

With the same performance last year, he said SCOR improved by 2.5 points. "So it's one improvement after another, which is credited for the expected profitability."

SCOR also has achieved a growth of 7 percent, he pointed out. "So again, from a market that is not really moving, we've been able to extract some sources of profitable growth. We are combining the two, which were the key objectives: expected profitability being improved, together with continued growth."

To achieve this, SCOR focused on portfolio management, canceling "nearly 10 percent of the renewable premium and replacing it with better premium"--a continuation of what was being done last year and the year before, he said.

"It's quite a bit of portfolio management and we are achieving a weighted average price increase of about 2 percent," Mr. Peignet said, adding that "while I think it is modest, the trend is probably more important than the figure itself. Having been able to achieve a bit of price increase shows that we had the capacity to negotiate with the clients that we thought we had."

Asked how SCOR was able to increase rates in an overall soft market, Mr. Peignet said, "We had price increases on property risk as well as property cat business in Europe in particular and also Australia and South Africa, where companies have been hit by high frequency of losses within their retention.

"So they are willing to buy more and willing to pay a bit more to protect their bottom line," he explained.

In the United States, he said, "the picture is a bit different, where the market is more competitive than Europe and Asia."

In the U.S., Mr. Peignet said, while SCOR did not see an increase in price, "we have achieved growth at an acceptable expected return on capital, but the segment we are targeting in the U.S. is regional business." He said SCOR's U.S. operation is focused on midsize clients. "And there we have a reasonably good run, while not getting increases but being able to reacquire business we lost a few years ago when we were downgraded."

SCOR was downgraded in 2003, placing some of its business in runoff, and regained an "A-minus" rating from A.M. Best in 2005.

"The fact that we took care of our runoff ourselves, assuming the responsibility of the underwriting, this has been perceived well," Mr. Peignet said. "We have a high ranking among the brokers for our claim services and the way we behaved. So we are recapitalizing on that to regain clients."