AXA BETS ON UK MARKET CONDITIONS IMPROVING

French insurer AXA anticipates an improvement in the UK market when the government realises that price restrictions on life assurance policies were “a step too far”. CEO Henri de Castries noted that the UK was the only market where AXA suffered a drop in underlying earnings, making a loss of 27m euro, down from a gain of 381m euro in 2002. Like-for-like revenue fell by more than 10% to 5.83bn euro. Mr de Castries said that AXA was betting that “regulation will change in the medium term and market conditions will improve”. The company’s life unit in the UK strengthened reserves by 218m euro last year and also suffered from not having a one-off gain of 133m euro that was registered in 2002. The company anticipates that its UK unit will return to profit this year.