Introducing Sampo’s business areas: Nordic Industrial

Sampo reports its financial performance under four segments based on its operational business areas. In this blog series, we have introduced our segments, concluding the series with Nordic Industrial.

Nordic Industrial focuses on insuring large Nordic corporate customers with turnover of more than SEK 500 million (around EUR 45 million) or more than 500 employees. Given their size, these customers have significantly broader and more complex insurance needs than those served by Nordic Commercial.

In total, we cover well over one thousand large Nordic corporates through our customer brand If. In 2025, the segment delivered EUR 1,046 million of gross written premiums, representing around 10 per cent of the Group total.

Although Nordic Industrial is the Group’s smallest segment, it is an essential part of Sampo’s unique profile as a well-diversified, leading P&C insurer in Northern Europe. As in all our Nordic customer segments, we hold a leading position in the market, supported by the scale and expertise needed to provide customers with tailored insurance and risk management solutions. In terms of products, property, employee benefits, and liability are the largest product lines within the segment.

A market shaped by brokers and international competition

Nordic Industrial operates in a broker-driven market characterised by complex risks and international competition. Unlike in Private Nordic and Nordic Commercial, brokers play a central role as intermediaries between large corporates and insurers. Further, the larger the client, the more likely it is to have a dedicated in-house team responsible for risk management and the purchase of insurance programmes.

The size and complexity of risks make reinsurance an important part of the business model. By sharing exposures with reinsurers, insurers can provide significant capacity to customers while managing their own risk exposure.

Compared with Nordic Commercial, which mainly serves SMEs and where competition is largely local, Nordic Industrial is much more exposed to international competition, given that large corporate risks require materially higher insurance capacity supported by reinsurers. As a result, competition and pricing in the Nordic industrial market are partly influenced by developments in global insurance capacity, which tends to move in cycles depending on market risk appetite.

Sampo is well positioned for these market dynamics. We have the scale and expertise needed to underwrite large and complex corporate risks, while our strong local presence and long-standing customer relationships give us a deep understanding of Nordic corporates and their businesses. At the same time, we can serve our Nordic Industrial customers through our own branch offices in the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, as well as through our network of global partners in the rest of the world.

Disciplined risk selection is key to sustained performance

Insuring large corporates naturally involves higher risk, as the portfolio consists of fewer but larger individual customers. While Private Nordic serves around 3.7 million households and Nordic Commercial approximately 460,000 customers, mainly SMEs, Nordic Industrial covers more than a thousand companies.

As a result, average customer exposures are significantly higher, and diversification is more limited than in private and SME segments, making the business more exposed to volatility from individual customers. Therefore, disciplined underwriting is even more important, requiring careful risk selection, appropriate pricing, and active exposure management. Growth is pursued within a disciplined underwriting framework where risks meet our underwriting and return on capital requirements.

In mid-2024, following a period of higher-than-expected large losses, we initiated targeted de-risking actions to reduce exposures to specific large property risks. These actions aimed to lower large claims volatility of the portfolio. Now, large claims have remained below budget for several quarters, supporting the segment’s strong underwriting performance in 2025 and the first half of 2026. While the favourable large claims experience is encouraging and likely partly reflects the measures we have taken, over the long-term outcomes should be broadly in line with budget. We know that there will be large claims, but not the timing of them as large claims, such as factory fires, are stochastic by nature.

Operational ambitions supporting financial targets

While we have not disclosed specific operational ambitions for Nordic Industrial, the segment contributes to the Group’s financial targets and our ambitions for the Nordic businesses, such as GWP growth of more than 10 per cent on average in personal insurance.

Personal insurance represents a particularly relevant growth opportunity across business areas. Demand is supported by structural trends across the Nordics, including pressure on public healthcare systems and an increasing focus on employee health and wellbeing. If’s Nordic Health Report highlights this trend, with more than half of Nordic respondents saying that an employer’s focus on health and mental wellbeing makes the employer more attractive.

A long-term approach through the cycle

Sampo and Zurich are the two leading players in the Nordic Industrial market, alongside our Nordic peers and other global insurers such as Allianz, AXA, and Chubb. Beyond these established operators, international carriers tend to enter and exit the market, reflecting the ebb and flow of international capital through global insurance cycles. In fact, the recent market development provides a good example of this in action.

Following several years of improving pricing, the competition in the Nordic Industrial market intensified again during 2025, and the 1 January 2026 renewals were among the most competitive seen in many years. For us, this is nothing new. It is part of the normal dynamics of the industrial market and highlights the value of building long-term relationships with customers, brokers, and partners. At the same time, our focus is on delivering attractive margins throughout the market cycle.

Underwriting discipline delivering results

Through disciplined underwriting, rather than relying on volume growth, Nordic Industrial can make a meaningful contribution to the Group’s earnings despite its relatively small size. In 2025, the segment’s underwriting result increased by 48 per cent to EUR 109 million (74), while the combined ratio improved to 81.3 per cent (88.7). Over 2015–2025, Nordic Industrial contributed by more than EUR 400 million to Sampo’s cumulative underwriting profit, while delivering attractive returns on capital.

To sum up, Nordic Industrial is an important part of Sampo’s value creation and our profile as a well-diversified, leading Northern European P&C insurer. Over time, shareholders can expect the segment to make an attractive and stable contribution to cumulative earnings.

This entry concludes our blog series.