Japan's Dai-IGi Life Eyes M&A in Southeast Asia to grow abroad | Company Business News

Dai-IGI Life Holdings Inc. Consider mergers and acquisitions in Southeast Asia as part of its plan to expand overseas, taking into account a growing but increasingly pressure market. Japan’s largest Japan life insurer looks at the Philippines and Malaysia as emerging markets that offer business opportunities as more households go up to the middle class, says Brett Clark, senior managing officer responsible for the firm’s Asia-Pacific outside Japan. Dai-IGI Life is also interested in expanding its customer base in Singapore, which has a profitable market that serves individuals with high net worth, but also very competitive, he said in an interview. “The whole Asia -Pacific is a competitive market and we are not complacent,” Clark said. “We would prefer to avoid small and subscale positions in many markets and rather have larger and scaled down positions in fewer markets.” Large Japanese life insurers want to expand profits from overseas operations, as a falling birth rate and an outdated population in the home market potential for growth. But the largest insurance markets in the US and Europe are already overcrowded, and competition is heating up in Asia, especially in developed economies such as Singapore. Sumitomo Life Insurance Co., for one, increased its presence in the city state in a big way last year, which made Singapore Life Holdings a wholly owned subsidiary. Dai-Iichi Life plans to generate about half of its group of adjusted profits from overseas life insurance operations in the financial year ending March 2031, with half of them coming from the Asia-Pacific outside Japan. The firm aims to increase the profit of the region to $ 1.5 billion of $ 576 billion during the period. Group adjusted profits are used to calculate shareholder returns, and to adjust the net income for accounting profits and losses. “If we could add an operating unit in Singapore or Malaysia or the Philippines, it would be ideal for us over the next few years,” Clark said. Potential measures include investments in local insurers, and it also considers asset management firms as M&A targets, he said. Dai-IGi Life already has operations in Australia, India and some Southeast Asian markets, including Vietnam. Clark was in fact an executive officer at Tower Australia Group Ltd. When Dai-IGi acquired it in 2011. © 2025 Bloomberg MP This article was generated from an automatic news agency feed without editing.