(Reuters) - Spanish insurer Mapfre said on Friday its first-half net profit jumped thanks to fewer and more benign natural disasters and a turnaround in its car insurance business in the United States.

Mapfre said its net profit rose 65% to 494 million euros ($536 million), up from 300 million euros in the same period a year ago, under new IFRS accounting rules.

According to local accounting rules, net profit rose 46% to 462 million euros.

Mapfre shares were up 1.6% in late morning trading, while the blue-chip IBEX35 index was down 0.1%.

The company attributed the profit increase to its unit in the United States where it managed to turn around a struggling auto insurance business with higher fees and as more benign weather conditions curbed insurance payouts.

Its North American unit contributed to the bottom line with a 41-million-euro profit compared with a 17-million-euro loss in the same period last year.

Mapfre also booked higher profits from its reinsurance business, which was hit by a devastating earthquake in Turkey in the first half of 2023. The company had to book a 99-million-euro loss because of the earthquake.

In the first half of this year, the main natural disaster was the flooding in Brazil, for which it had to book a 41-million-euro loss.

"There were no other relevant catastrophes," it said.

In the first six months of 2024, the group's revenues amounted to 17.72 billion euros, up 4.1% from a year earlier. The non-life combined ratio at the end of June stood at 95.7%, a decrease of 1.4 percentage points.

($1 = 0.9215 euros)

(Reporting by Jakub Olesiuk and Joao Vicente, editing by Inti Landauro and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)