Leading commercial property insurer FM today announced the wider launch of FM Essential, an insurance product to support a broader group of manufacturing companies seeking to strengthen their resilience and more proactively embrace a culture of loss prevention.
Unveiled at RISKWORLD in Philadelphia, USA, the new product comes at a time when manufacturing companies face an increasingly challenging global risk landscape. FM Essential offers manufacturers a flexible path to navigate those challenges.
“Resilience has evolved from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential priority for businesses around the globe,” said Alex Tadmoury, executive vice president, International, at FM in a statement. “FM Essential brings together engineering insight, data analytics and competitive risk transfer capabilities to help manufacturers navigate complexity and focus investment where it has the greatest impact.”
“Manufacturers in India are scaling rapidly ranging from relatively simple manufacturing operations with critical bottlenecks to highly complex sites with interconnected supply chains and operational dependencies,” said Sumit Khanna, CEO, FMIC India - Reinsurance Branch in a statement. “FM Essential is designed to meet organizations at an earlier stage of their resilience journey, combining engineering insight from a loss‑prevention standpoint with data‑led intelligence and a more flexible (re)insurance pathway. In India, with our cedants, the reinsurance offering reflects the realities of growth in this market and provides manufacturers with an option to a long‑term, risk‑to‑resilience strategy and towards continual stability.”
A new insurance option for manufacturers
Offered through FM's broker partners, FM Essential is initially designed to serve manufacturing companies with a medium risk complexity profile. The solution features a more streamlined quote process and supports both 100% capacity placements as well as insurance programs shared by multiple insurers.
According to the company, FM Essential goes beyond a traditional insurance product by combining core engineering solutions and claims expertise with intelligence built on FM’s unique understanding of property risk. FM's artificial intelligence capability is grounded in data from more than 40,000 client location evaluations conducted each year by 1,100 engineers and validated through real loss experience.
Through FM Essential, brokers can offer an additional placement option for their manufacturing clients, helping to strengthen client relationships by supporting their long‑term resilience journeys, not just renewal‑to‑renewal transactions.
In addition, FM Essential is designed to support manufacturers at earlier stages of their resilience journey, complementing FM’s broader suite of property insurance solutions.
After a successful pilot last year in New York, France and India, FM Essential is now expanding into further hubs in Chicago and Cleveland, with Atlanta and Dallas to follow shortly in the United States. On the international stage, Australia, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Switzerland launched the offering in the first quarter of 2026. Germany and the United Kingdom are slated for the second quarter. Additional countries will continue to be added in the future.
The new offering complements FM’s existing products—with FM Affiliated dedicated to middle-market non-manufacturing occupancies and specific verticals; and the FM flagship mutual with market-leading coverage and risk management solutions for large, highly protected businesses, including specialty industries.
Established nearly two centuries ago, FM is a leading mutual insurance company whose capital, scientific research capability and engineering expertise are solely dedicated to property risk management and the resilience of its policyholder-owners.
