Bermuda insurance giant Ace Ltd. says it is far better prepared for meeting claims from a hurricane season of above-normal intensity than it was before Hurricane Katrina.

Ace's chief financial officer Phil Bancroft said if the 2005 storm scenario ¿ which saw hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma devastate the US Gulf Coast ¿ played out again this year, then Ace's losses would be about 30 percent lower than they were then.

His comment came in a conference call yesterday, following the release of Ace's second-quarter earnings statement on Tuesday, which showed the company's net income for the April through June period was $649 million an increase of 13 percent on the same period last year.

The results were achieved despite catastrophe losses that Ace put at $88m and chairman and chief executive officer Evan Greenberg said yesterday that around $59m resulted from the flood in the UK last month.

More flooding has left swathes of western and central England underwater this week and one investor asked how much impact the latest inundation would have.

Mr. Greenberg replied that virtually all of those losses were on the insurance side reinsurance losses amounted to $4m. UK exposure was principally in insurance of large businesses and the company had bought catastrophe excess coverage, he added.

"This is all manageable, from everything I know of and so it's not of great concern," Mr. Greenberg said. He added that Ace was working on an estimation of $300m for its share of total catastrophe losses world-wide during the second half of the year.

Another investor had concerns over Ace's exposure to the US subprime mortgage market in which loans have been given to people with poor credit records and which has seen many defaults in the light of rising interest rates over the past year.

Ace's chief investment officer Tim Boroughs said the company's mortgage portfolio amounted to $12.3 billion, of which $2.3bn was commercial business and $9.5bn residential. Of that, the subprime exposure amounted to only $280m.

Mr. Greenberg was asked about the Ace's growth in the accident and health market. Using a baseball analogy to describe how much more growth he believed was possible in that line of business, the CEO said: "I would say we're in the second inning of that ball game."

"I don't see, in the long term, any reason why that business wouldn't continue to grow," Mr. Greenberg said. "In Latin America and Asia, there is tremendous scope to drive the market. The market is expanding every year, because the middle class is growing in all of those countries. The distribution vehicles are becoming more sophisticated and effective, such as department stores and utilities. We have the products and the infrastructure to take advantage."

In the shape of its presence in numerous countries around the world, Ace had the "apparatus" to succeed in markets such as accident and health and growth would come by incrementally adding on to that apparatus, Mr. Greenberg added.