While Promina, for now the local branch of Royal & SunAlliance, gears itself up for its enormous Asia-Pacific asset sale, the London-based parent continues its horror run with investors. The company announced a 2002 loss of $2.3 billion, compared to the previous year’s $587 million loss.

Revenue fell from $22.8 billion (a good indication of the huge size of R&SA) to $22.3 billion.  Trouble is, the company has been doing it tough with investors for the past couple of years – it was an early victim of the London stockmarket downturn. But acting CEO Bob Gunn bit the bullet this year and reduced the 2002 dividend to 41 cents a share.

That will save him $366 million, and help to top up a $1.28 billion hole in R&SA’s staff pension fund, which he said will be refinanced over the next 10 years. He is also shedding 12,000 jobs and shedding non-core operations like the Asia-Pacific group.

Mr Gunn said while 2002 wasn’t a year of strong performance, “we have some excellent lines of business that produced another year of good profitable results and we believe that we have taken actions to address those businesses where performance has been disappointing”.

“We firmly believe that our long-standing strategy of focusing on general insurance is correct,” he said. “The outlook for the general insurance industry is very good at the moment and we are determined to capitalise on it.”