TMK: Asia-Pac losses increasingly driven by supply chain issues

The financial impact of major insurance losses in Asia-Pacific is increasingly being driven by downtime, delayed recovery and supply chain dependencies rather than physical damage alone, according to specialist insurer Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK).

While physical damage drives the lion's share of most losses, insurers and businesses are finding that significant potential losses often emerge during the recovery phase, when operational disruption, specialist resource shortages, and supply chain bottlenecks extend the path back to normal operations. 

Analysis of TMK’s largest Asia-Pacific losses over the past two decades shows that while physical damage often triggers a claim, the factors ultimately driving claim severity extend far beyond the initial event. Business interruption, supply chain disruption, financial default and recovery challenges all played a significant role in determining the final cost of major losses, highlighting how downtime and delayed recovery are increasingly influencing claim outcomes. 

The trend is reflected across the wider market. Business interruption was ranked the leading business risk in Asia-Pacific in the Allianz 2025 Risk Barometer. According to Hannover Re, business interruption losses can account for up to 70% of total catastrophe losses, while Swiss Re estimates that supply chain disruptions cost businesses an average of $184 million annually.

Recent earthquakes affecting Taiwan’s semiconductor industry illustrate the challenge. Concentration of production within a small number of highly specialised facilities means that disruption can have consequences across global supply chains. Recovery efforts often depend on specialist expertise and equipment and complex OEM relationships, demonstrating how claim outcomes are increasingly influenced by recovery capability as much as physical damage.

A similar pattern emerged following Cyclone Gabrielle in New Zealand, where labour shortages, material constraints and prolonged restoration periods continued to influence claims costs long after the event itself had passed. 

Sugenthran Ramasamy, head of claims, TMK Asia, said: “Twenty years ago, major claims were primarily about repairing physical damage. Today, the bigger challenge is often restoring operations and how quickly a business can recover, which increasingly determines the ultimate cost of a loss. What might once have been a contained physical incident can now create disruption far beyond the original event. Recovery can also be prolonged by the complexity of modern businesses, particularly highly integrated technology environments that can be difficult to repair, replace, or restore. The challenge for many organisations is that these dependencies are not always fully understood until a loss occurs.”

According to TMK, repeated events, industrial concentration and interconnected supply chains are challenging traditional assumptions around loss accumulation and catastrophe exposure. Events such as the 2011 Thailand floods demonstrated how a localised catastrophe can become a global loss event when critical industries and suppliers are concentrated in a single location, highlighting the need to assess risks not only individually, but also through the dependencies that connect them.

Recent events have shown how significant financial losses can arise from operational disruption even when no physical damage occurs. The 2024 CrowdStrike outage also demonstrated the extent to which businesses now depend on interconnected digital infrastructure, with disruption quickly spreading across industries and geographies. 

Together these trends underscore the growing importance of understanding operational dependencies and recovery capabilities when assessing risk. 

The findings form part of TMK's forthcoming white paper, Priced But Not Understood, which examines how evolving patterns of risk are reshaping claims experience across Asia-Pacific.

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