Even as market conditions make growth harder to achieve, Brown & Brown Inc. continues its upward trajectory in all the key areas of its business.

The Daytona Beach, Fla.-based company's brokerage revenues increased 11.5% last year, to $864.7 million, vaulting it to the sixth-largest brokerage in the world.

Gross revenues rose 11.7%, to $878 million. Net income grew 14.5% to $172.3 million.

Those growth rates will be hard to maintain as insurance rates continue to drop, conceded J. Hyatt Brown, chairman and chief executive officer. Still, "we're getting very close to a goal we set five years ago to achieve $1 billion in revenue and a 40% operating margin," Mr. Brown said.

Continuing softness in property and casualty markets has created "a substantial head wind" for Brown & Brown, Mr. Brown said. But, "we sell more insurance when prices are going down than when they're going up. That's the bright side," he said.

Another positive for Brown & Brown, which has long held a growth-by-acquisition strategy, is that more agencies and brokerage firms consider selling as returns decline, Mr. Brown noted.

In late 2005, Brown & Brown acquired reinsurance brokerage operations when it bought Axiom Intermediaries L.L.C. Reinsurance revenues in 2006 grew to $11.1 million from slightly more than $2 million a year earlier.

One of the company's largest acquisitions in the past year was ALCOS Inc., a Sterling Heights, Mich.-based agency with about $18 million in annual revenue.

Among other highlights of the past year, Brown & Brown in January announced that Regional Executive Vp J. Powell Brown was elected president and will succeed his father, Hyatt Brown, as CEO in July 2009.

Brown & Brown's core customers are middle-market businesses and public entities, and most insurance programs are placed on a commission basis.

Unlike some of its larger competitors, Brown & Brown openly accepts contingent and other supplemental compensation from underwriters.

Most of those payments are in the form of profit-based contingent commissions, and Brown & Brown reported $41 million of such compensation in 2006, up from $35 million in 2005. All forms of compensation the company may receive are fully disclosed to clients, Mr. Brown said.

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