(Bloomberg) -- Chubb Corp., the insurer of corporate boards and high-end homes, declined the most since January after first-quarter profit fell 32 percent, missing analysts’ estimates, on claims from winter weather in the U.S.
Chubb slipped 3.1 percent to $88.85 at 9:50 a.m. in New York, the biggest slump in the 24-company KBW Insurance Index. The insurer has dropped about 8.1 percent this year.
Net income fell to $449 million, or $1.80 a share, from $656 million, or $2.48, the Warren, New Jersey-based company said in a statement late yesterday. Operating profit, which excludes some investment results. was $1.50 a share, missing by six cents the average estimate of 20 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Paul Newsome, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill & Partners LP, had estimated $1.78 a share.
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“The earnings miss relative to our estimate was driven by a materially worse than expected underwriting performance that served to more than offset slightly higher than expected investment income,” Newsome wrote in a note to investors. “We find the company’s underwriting underperformance interesting in light of a strong underwriting performance out of Travelers’ first-quarter 2014 earnings earlier this week.”
Travelers Cos., the lone property-and-casualty insurer in the Dow Jones industrial average, reported April 22 that first- quarter profit climbed 17 percent. New York-based Travelers slipped 35 cents to $88.24 today, bringing its drop for the year to about 2.5 percent.
