Kingstone Announces 2023 Third Quarter Financial Results
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Kingstone Announces 2023 Third Quarter Financial Results

ACCESS Newswire · Kingstone Companies, Inc.
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KINGSTON, NY / ACCESSWIRE / November 9, 2023 / Kingstone Companies, Inc. (NASDAQ:KINS) (the "Company" or "Kingstone"), a Northeast regional property and casualty insurance holding company, today announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2023. The Company will host a conference call for analysts and investors on November 13, 2023, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, as previously announced on October 18, 2023.

2023 Third Quarter and Nine Months Financial and Operational Highlights

(All results are compared to prior year periods unless otherwise noted; 000's omitted)

Core Results (New York Business)

  • Direct written premiums1 increased to $46,025 for Three Months (up 4.7%) and $129,663 for Nine Months (up 9.6%)

  • Policies in Force declined by 4.5% as compared to September 30, 2022 (see Management Commentary for explanation)

  • Net premiums earned increased to $24,388 for Three Months (up 2.1%) and to $73,607 for Nine Months (up 6.5%)

  • Net loss ratio for Three Months of 72.1% and Nine Months of 69.8%. Net loss ratio excluding catastrophes for Three Months of 64.7% and Nine Months of 64.3%.

Non-Core Results

  • Direct written premiums1 declined $4,676 for Three Months (down 43.9%) and $11,451 for Nine Months (down 39.5%)

  • Policies in Force declined by 38.9% as compared to September 30, 2022

  • Net premiums earned decreased to $3,550 for Three Months (down 35.1%) and to $12,095 for Nine Months (down 18.5%)

  • Net loss ratio for Three Months of 122.8% and for Nine Months of 125.6%. Net loss ratio excluding catastrophes for Three Months of 112.5% and Nine Months of 98.5%.

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1 These measures are not based on accounting principles generally accepted in the United States ("GAAP") and are defined and reconciled below to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

Management Commentary

Meryl Golden, Kingstone Chief Executive Officer, commented, "Continuing our desire to bring more transparency to our results, we have added additional information that has not been included in prior press releases. This will allow you to see how much progress the Kingstone team has made on our Kingstone 3.0 initiatives. I have laid out below the four main pillars to our 2023 strategy, and I note that we are on track or ahead of plan for each as follows:

  1. Aggressively Reduce Non-Core Business--Losses incurred on the non-Core business were unacceptable, and we could no longer allow that to continue. While underwriting and pricing efforts were made to correct this over the prior few years, we were not successful and macro trends such as inflation and reinsurance pricing only made matters worse. We stopped writing all new business outside of New York and have been aggressively reducing policy count this year, subject to regulatory requirements. Our non-Core policy count is down by 35% year to date, and we expect this decline to accelerate to about 50% by year-end 2023 and to more than 80% by year-end 2024.

  2. Adjust Pricing to Stay Ahead of Trends--Inflation has been a dominant headwind that we hope is receding. We have been cognizant that inflation's impact on loss costs places added pressure on premiums and, as such, we have been more frequent and aggressive with our rate change requests. Similarly, home replacement values reflect that same inflationary pressure. In September 2023, we completed our first cycle of valuation adjustments, making sure that all homes were insured to value. As a result, we have seen a rise in premiums attributable to the heightened replacement costs. Overall average written premium for our Legacy New York homeowners policies for the last 12 months, reflecting both rate and replacement cost changes, increased by 25.5%. Let me remind you that most of the added premiums have not yet been earned and will be reflected in future quarters.

  3. Tightly Manage Reinsurance Requirements--We needed to contain our exposure to spiking reinsurance pricing. We did so and were able to reduce the required limit to be purchased while maintaining our same risk tolerance. We used all the tools available to us to limit new business that was deemed to be too expensive and at the same time re-underwrote the book to cull those risks which presented the greatest risk. The combination of stricter new business underwriting and increased non-renewals gave rise to the 4.5% decline in policy count for our Core book. We have now reverted most of our new business underwriting standards back to what they were previously so Core new business growth should increase going forward.

  4. Reduce Expenses--We have been unrelenting in driving down our costs. We set a 2023 goal to achieve a 33% net underwriting expense ratio by year end. For this quarter, the net underwriting expense ratio was 31.7%, a reduction of 5.2 points in spite of the 4.8% decline in net earned premiums. For nine months, we have achieved our 33% goal. We remain fixated on reducing our costs and hope we can continue to improve on this very important metric.