China is looking to stretch the boundaries of captive
insurance strategies, according to Dominic Wheatley of Guernsey
Finance.
There has been much comment recently about the development of
insurance and risk financing in China, and particularly about the
growing interest in the use of captive insurance companies amongst
Chinese corporations.
Of course, the readership of this publication is aware that
captives are well established strategic tools among the world's
top companies with the vast majority of them using captives for a
variety of purposes and across the full range of corporate risks.
However, to date, their use has been limited amongst major Chinese
corporation.
The reasons for this are not hard to see. As most assets and
corporations have been publicly owned in China, risk has simply
been assumed by the government and losses met out of current
government revenues. Not surprisingly insurance has not been
seen as necessary by managers or their public
