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Baldwin and Lyons Inc., the Indianapolis-based insurance company that specializes in trucking insurance policies, looks like a company on the road to bigger things.
In 1985, B&L reported a 300 percent increase in premiums written. Its stock has surged 46 points in the past year; a stock split may be just around the corner. And with record first-quarter earnings reported last week, the company has an opportunity to increase the amount of business it can write.
Yet the $224.9 million-in-assets insurer apparently is content to idle for the moment.
"We will tend to move forward quite cautiously," says John C. Aldin, chairman and CEO of Baldwin & Lyons. He's not just being coy.
As many Americans who can't buy insurance these days have discovered, there were many insurance companies that couldn't survive the record losses reported in the risk industry in 1984.
And the ones that survived aren't necessarily eager for new business.
So B&L, operating in an industry that is strewn with the wreckage of other companies that didn't steer clear of the problems, isn't thinking in overly agressive terms.
In 1986, Aldin said B&L is shooting for about the same total revenues as it had in 1985, about $100 million. After a 1983 moritorium on writing small-fleet programs, B&L has eliminated that portion of its business, its least profitable. And the company has placed expansion into general lines of insurance on hold.
Much of Baldwin's growth in 1985 came as the...