Insurers paid out $31 billion in catastrophe losses last year — 25 billion below the long-term average losses, the world’s biggest reinsurer revealed yesterday.

Munich Re — which has just launched a $63 billion sidecar listed on the Bermuda Stock Exchange — added that predicted losses in the US were $12.8 billion — less than half the $29.4 billion annual average for 2000-12, which is likely to make 2013 the best year for net income since the global financial crisis hit in 2008.

The projection is based on data from the first nine months of last year, when profits were already the highest since 2007 and the trend is expected to hold for last three months of 2013.

Robert Hartwig, president of the US-based Insurance Information Institute, told BestWeek: “The industry’s return on equity was about nine percent through the first nine months of 2013.

“That’s well above what we saw in 2012. The full year 2013 will easily beat 2012 because the fourth quarter of 2012 contained Hurricane Sandy.”

Mr Hartwig added that the US property and casualty industry had started this year with a record high surplus at the end of the third quarter of 2013 of $624.3 billion.

He added: “The industry is certainly prepared for what could be, and what could always be, a spate of mega-catastrophes in the next 12 months.”

Peter Hoppe, head of Munich Re’s geo-risks research, said that factors that lead to quiet hurricane and tornado seasons in the US are not expected to automatically recur.

Both seasons in 2012 were affected by short-term weather patterns that are unlikely to repeat this year.

No hurricane-strength storms made landfall in the US in 2013, while there were 900 tornadoes — well below the three-year average of 1,173, although there were some serious tornado spates last year.

Tornadoes last May hit Oklahoma and caused more than $1 billion in insured losses and a series of November storms that swept through the Midwestern US is also expected to produce insured losses of more than $1 billion.

But flooding was a major driver of global insured losses last year, with the single most expensive event being the June floods that inundated Germany and the Czech Republic last June.

And Mr Hoppe said that 2013 may have signalled the start of a period of increased typhoon activity — although he stressed that more data was needed.

But he added that the potential for more typhoons was due to natural oscillation in the Pacific Ocean.

Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, hit the central Philippines last November.