Comparative concentration.

How to read

This page orders the 16 plotted SUSEP families from the lowest to the highest median HHI in 2024. On the left, families where the regulator allows and the market tolerates fragmentation · Property, Individual Persons, Auto Hull and Housing coexist with more than six relevant economic groups in each line, configuring a typically competitive structure. On the right, RURAL, Credit and Nuclear lines present HHI close to 10,000 · pure or near monopoly, given the technical specialization of the line, the minimum capital scale required, or government subsidy that limits entry.

Individual outliers marked in cardinal are lines whose concentration escapes the family regime · however, this deviation does not always indicate pathology, whereas it may reflect a legitimate niche where only one or two operators developed technical capacity. Violin width translates distribution density around the median · flat violins signal families with homogeneous HHI across lines, while elongated or bimodal shapes indicate heterogeneous structural regime within the family itself.

Regulatory implications

Careful editorial interpretation requires that the reader maintain distinction between structural and behavioral concentration. RURAL with median HHI 5,806 is not a cartel case · it is a small market (lines with annual premium below R$ 200 million in several cases) where minimum actuarial scale requires technical specialization and where government subsidy via PSR distorts competition at the origination edge. On the other hand, Property with median HHI 1,992 does not mean pulverized market in a strict sense · it is fragmentation channeled through corporate brokerage, with few operators dominating the channel and many maintaining marginal presence.

CR4 (concentration of the four largest operators) is the appropriate complementary indicator to distinguish these regimes · a line with high HHI and high CR4 signals effective oligopoly, whereas high HHI and moderate CR4 suggests a small market where the index math inflates apparent concentration without real behavioral restriction. The concentration page presents both indicators side by side for the ten largest lines · cross-reference available at concentration · top-4 cogroups.

Methods

HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) is calculated as the sum of squared market shares of each operator in the line, expressed in base 10,000 (DOJ scale). Competitive market: HHI below 1,500. Moderate concentration: between 1,500 and 2,500. High concentration: above 2,500. Pure monopoly: 10,000. The operator unit in the SUSEP cut is the economic cogroup, not individual CNPJ, which groups subsidiaries of the same holding and avoids artificial inflation of the index. Quartiles Q1, median, and Q3 are calculated with linear interpolation over the HHIs of the family's lines, and Tukey outliers are lines whose HHI excede Q3 + 1.5 × IQR.

Violin density is estimated via Gaussian kernel with Silverman's bandwidth rule (1.06 × σ × n^(-1/5)), sufficient for approximately normal distributions and robust for n ≥ 3. Families with insufficient coverage (n < 3) fall back to strip plot · just individual points without density estimate · given that KDE collapses with very small samples. I should note that this analysis serves as methodological illustration of the aggregate structural regime, not as antitrust evaluation of individual lines, and whoever needs specific regulatory evaluation should consult primary source and consider additional variables not in this study's slice.