Emergency Contact The Shipowners' Club report a steady year Home Latest updates News The Shipowners' Club report a steady year 19 Apr 2018 Download Sign up for alerts 19 April 2018 - Shipowners’ Club, the leading mutual P&I insurer in the smaller and specialist vessel sector, has reported positive results for the year ending 31 December 2017, despite the challenging market conditions to both the insurance and shipping sectors. The Club has reported a combined ratio of 99.1%, stability in Member and vessel numbers, a small uplift in gross tonnage to 25.48m and an overall surplus of US$ 47.7m, including a return on the investment portfolio of US$ 47.5m. In announcing the results, Chairman Philip Orme highlighted that “the Club continues to experience a steady period as shipping seeks to recover from a depressed market, affecting many of our operating sectors, and whilst the marine insurance industry has come under increased pressure from soft market conditions. Despite these challenges we are proud to have achieved a positive underwriting result, in pursuit of providing insurance ‘at cost’ on behalf of our membership. This reflects the true purpose, value and strength of the mutual system. Members continue to lay vessels up, especially in the offshore sector and, whilst organic growth has slowed, we have still seen consistent growth in certain sectors coupled with stability through our strong retention statistics. Furthermore, Members have also returned to us having previously left to try alternative markets. This is always encouraging and we are proud to welcome these returning Members. Similarly to last year, we have also seen the average size of entered vessels increase as older tonnage is replaced by larger units. “In line with our budget we returned a small surplus on the technical account. Our investments performed very well and the Club now holds capital of more than US$ 340m. We have no doubt that the volatility in the market will continue for a while, so