Bermuda's insurance and reinsurance capital raising race shows no signs of slowing down after IPC Holdings Ltd announced yesterday that a total of $547 million has been raised through an initial public offering.

The company said it closed its public offering and had received net proceeds of $380,380,000 from its offering of 15,200,000 shares at an offering price of $26 per share.

The lead underwriters for the offering were Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs who chose to exercise their option to purchase an additional 2,280,000 shares, providing further net proceeds to the company of $57,057,000 for a total of $437,437,000 from the public offering.

In addition to funds raised in the public offering, the company sold 2,847,000 shares to American International Group, Inc. (AIG) in a concurrent private placement at the public offering price of $26 per share and AIG exercised its option to purchase 2,775,000 shares at $12.7746 per share.

Total funds from AIG amounted to $109,471,515.

President and Chief Executive Officer of IPC Holdings Ltd Jim Bryce said: "We are very pleased to have been able to increase our capital by $547 million to meet the needs of our clients reinsurance capacity. We look forward to employing our new capacity."

This new capital makes IPC Holdings Ltd. -which has been in Bermuda for more than eight years - the latest company with more than $1 billion in capital.

Before the latest share offering, IPC Holdings Ltd. had total assets of more than $700 million, and total shareholders investment of approximately $580 million.

The new capital will be a boost for the company which has expected losses from the World Trade Centre disaster of $95 million.

Prospectuses relating to IPC Holdings Ltd public offering may be obtained from Morgan Stanley & Co. at 1585 Broadway, New York.

IPC Holdings Ltd., through its wholly owned subsidiary IPCRe Limited, provides property catastrophe reinsurance and, to a limited extent, marine, aviation, property-per-risk excess and other short tail property reinsurance on a worldwide basis.

Bermuda is experiencing a boom in the reinsurance market, with $6.9 billion raised for new companies which include Arch Re set up by Arch Capital Group Ltd. and backed by private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Hellman & Friedman with $1 billion which will write broad-based multiline reinsurance

Axis Speciality was set up by insurance broker Marsh & McLennan with $1.6 billion in capital to write property, aviation, war and other lines of business.

DaVinci Re was set up by Renaissance Re Holdings Ltd. with $500 million initial backing from investors including Sate Farm, the largest US insurer, to write property/catastrophe.

Endurance Speciality Insurance was set up by Aon Corporation and Zurich Financial Services with $1.2 billion to write commerical property/casualty insurance and reinsurance.

In addition to the new insurer, Aon has added some property and reinsurance lines to its own underwriting unit, Combined Speciality Corp.

Montpelier Re was started by White Mountains with $1 billion to write property/casualty business.

Allied World Assurance Company was set up by AIG, Chubb Corp and Goldman Sachs with $1.5 billion to write property/casualty business.

Goshawk Re was set up by Goshawk Insurance Holdings Ltd. and is aiming to raise $100 million to write excess liability and property/catastrophe business.

Existing companies that have raised new capital include Ace Ltd. ($1.15 billion), XL Capital ($0.82 billion), Partner Re ($0.4 billion), Renaissance Re ($0.3 billion ) and PXRE ($0.15 billion).

Total new capital that has been raised by existing companies is now $3.677 billion dollars, taking the total new capital in Bermuda to over $10 billion.

All of the new companies are hoping to be up and running for the January renewal season, less than three weeks away.