South African insurance giant on a roll

OUTsurance has delivered another set of strong results, as the insurance giant’s South African and Australian businesses shot the lights out.

However, the company’s relatively new Irish business continues to struggle, with its operating losses more than doubling in the 2025 financial year.

OUTsurance is one of South Africa’s largest insurance companies, operating in South Africa, Australia and Ireland.

In South Africa, OUTsurance offers car, home, business, life, funeral and pet insurance. In Australia, its Youi subsidiary provides car, home, business and compulsory third-party insurance, while OUTsurance Ireland offers car and home insurance.

On Monday, 15 September 2025, OUTsurance released its results for the year ended 30 June 2025. These results revealed a strong performance, with insurance revenue up 16.35% to R37.13 billion.

The company’s profit for the year grew by 16.21% to R5.22 billion, while earnings per share rose by 15.33% to 306.2 cents.

This strong growth was largely driven by stand-out performances from the company’s South African and Australian businesses.

The insurer explained that stronger organic growth recorded by Youi Direct and OUTsurance South Africa drove a 16.8% increase in property and casualty gross written premium.

However, in rand terms, this premium growth took a slight hit as the local currency strengthened against the Australian dollar over the 2025 financial year.

In addition, Youi’s broker channel book (BZI), which is currently in runoff, experienced a contraction of the gross written premium.

Overall, OUTsurance’s claims ratio improved from 56.8% in the prior year to 53.6%, driven by favourable natural perils experience and disciplined underwriting.

One drag on these results was OUTsurance’s Irish business, OUTsurance Ireland, which saw its operating loss for the year more than double, going from R218 million in 2024 to R448 million.

This business segment was launched in May 2025 and has gained good traction since, generating R269 million gross written premium in its first full year of operations.

OUTsurance said the 2025 and 2026 financial years are expected to incur the largest start-up losses on the journey to achieve break-even, which is expected by the 2029 financial year.

Another standout performer in these results was OUTsurance Life, which grew its operating profit by 65.9% to R438 million.

This was driven by reduced expenses, good new business momentum in the Direct and Funeral segments, coupled with the impact of favourable yield movements.

OUTsurance’s normalised investment income also performed well, increasing by 49.1% to R2.29 billion, driven by the organic growth in investable assets and favourable equity markets.

In light of these strong results, OUTsurance declared a final dividend of 149 cents per share and a special dividend of 33.1 cents per share.