Top 50 Reinsurers - Financial year 2005: a sudden, sharp pain out of a clear blue sky.

(From Reinsurance)

Welcome to our ranking of the top 50 reinsurers for the 2005 financial year. Many thanks to you if you sent in your company data to help complete this enormous annual undertaking.

Every year, after Easter has come and gone, the researchers, journalists and production staff at the magazine start to feel a slight nausea come upon them as the enormity of the task in hand starts to make itself manifest.

Of course, there are the inevitable anomalies and paradoxes. For instance, as ever, we are double-counting Lloyd's numbers - after all, half of the players in our top 50 list do some sort of business in the room - so to exclude Lloyd's for this reason would indeed be churlish.

In fact, it is the anomalies and tongue twisters that highlight the great value (and folly) of attempting to make an all-encompassing list of the world's largest reinsurers. In short, such an activity is good for the soul, especially if that soul belongs to a financial journalist! Even if the results are always hotly disputed, often ambiguous and as often more noteworthy for their omissions than their inclusions, the end result is a spectacle, and an interesting snapshot of the way the reinsurance world looked at midnight on New Year's Eve 2005.

Every picture tells a story

So what does the picture tell us this year? This time around, we decided to tackle things slightly differently, streamlining the data we requested and bringing life reinsurance premiums into the final countdown for the first time.