Mark Norbom

We’ll get started with the afternoon sessions. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. You will find in front of you a small memento from us, a flash disk with all the presentations from the speakers, in Malaysia as well as Vietnam. Now you can look at the slides over and over, you can share them with your family, show your kids – I’m sure they’ll love it. Are objective both last night and with today’s session is to give you a better feel for the market, give you a better feel for our people who actually drive the business, and I think Ajay’s session, in the fund’s management, session over all gave you a pretty good feel fro that business. To just put it to in to prospective the MSB, the profitability coming from that business, from Ajay’s business from the first half of this year was 20% of our MSB. So it is a significant portion of our business, it is growing, it does show you how we are finding opportunities within this market and we’re going after them. But it’s not just the MSB. Again, the value of that business, it has also bought, as I think Garth had in his presentation, it brings value by managing the life assets for both Asia and the UK. And in the last three years that value has been equalled at £240 million of out-performance of the benchmark. So when you look at the value of the business it’s not just the £10 million of MSB that are earned in the first half of this year, it’s the out performance of the benchmark that contributes to our life businesses. And then the third element, again, I would re-enforce, and that’s the product innovation. Bringing us investments that we can wrap protection around and use as unit link business. Investment linked products for our life business so again, it’s part of the integrated operating model and it’s driving tremendous value to our business. OK, and now we’re going to turn it over to Dan and his team of – we’ll here from four CEOs who’ll tell us all about Taiwan, China, India and Vietnam. But first we’ll start with Dan giving us an over view on insurance business growth and then we’ll hear from his other CEOs.

Dan Bardin

Good afternoon, we’re into the home stretch. Last night’s event was a great opportunity for us to see one of our companies. I think a couple had asked if I had been to an even like that before. Hundreds of times – that’s why I probably looked twenty years older than I actually am, probably. All different style and that kind of thing, but I think it shows what kind of teamwork and the kind of enthusiasm we have.

OK, growth opportunities in Asia. Just a few things to kind of restate; Asia remains a growth market – no doubt about that one. Penetration rates remain far below the US and the UK, and the sources of growth across our twelve markets differ. It’s due to the stages of development, the different market environments, also our competitive position.

This is one we've covered before about how we’ve grouped the different kinds of markets and we do. We have different models and also our models are evolving, but if you look to the far right with Taiwan, Japan and Korea being distribution pioneers because it’s a stage we entered the market. Focus on profitable segments, going back to the centre with our three established markets that have been around for a long time, they have been there and they’re regional leaders. And they demonstrate that with their leadership and their people, with the best practices, but they still continue to innovate like sales force automation that goes across the region.

Down to Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, which were green field or acquisition in that pre ’98 group. They’re ready to go to that next stage but these are markets that continue to develop and grow as we’ve opened up Unit Linked Indonesia and Philippines, and we really think that Unit Linked will come about in Thailand, probably some time next year, continue to evolve. Going up to looking at Vietnam and India, and leveraging on our leadership position. We got scale early and in India that meant multiple distribution. Here in Vietnam we are ready for the bancassurance as the market’s ready but at this point we have a scale agency force. And the last up there, basically China, we have three licenses today and as deregulation takes place in 2005, we will aggressively pursue those opportunities and move across the country as the CRRC, as the regulator allows us to move.

The four speakers today, I think I can say I think you will find each one very different and just as our markets are different and Chee Cheong, talking about managing profitable growth. She has I guess about twenty years in the business, fairly new to us and took our biggest company to start this year and is really helping us continually to transform this business. This is a very important market for us, and sometimes a tough market because some of the competitors are taking a different approaches to the market.

Phong, you’ve all met him and he’s leveraging the platform. I think Phong started our company here in 1999, and has been our CEO and so he was the guy who turned on the light switch first day, and he works very hard. He’s assembled a great team. And Vietnam was a market that a lot of the staff that you would be recruiting necessarily hadn’t studied outside of the country so to find staff and develop them has been probably been one of our biggest tasks. But Phong’s done a terrific job together not only a scale agency team but also staff that can manage this business.

Shikha came from leadership through innovation and she is extraordinarily innovative. She came from within ICICI and really came to us with no insurance experience, and I would say today she is probably one of the most experienced CEO's I have, understands this business top to bottom, and it’s a multi-distribution channel that we run as well. It’s a complex market. All the players showed up in India and they’re all there trying to garner a market share. And if you look at whether Pru’s brand which were the most recognised and of all the foreign players, or the scale of our agency force, or the scale of our bank assurance all being top.

And then you have opportunity to meet Captain Chia, and Captain is running our China operation for us. And this is an important place for us. Not that the others aren’t. but when I had to make a selection who to put into China I picked somebody I knew and I trusted and I’ve known some time who had a great reputation, and captain is quite a dynamo and a leader, and he’s working across China today and really making Prudential that company that everybody else wants to be like. So I think you have four speakers, very diverse, different, and so with that I’ll bring up Chee Cheong to start off the afternoon. Thank you.

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