No surprises in the Life Industry 2018
Today the Insurance commission shared the numbers based on the quarterly submissions of the Life Insurance companies in the Philippines, always a moment that many people in the industry have been waiting for. Although some keep looking for ways how to tamper the numbers and prepare totally new lists and rankings, in order to find that so needed recognition, most of us just benchmark our own performance to the industry and find ways how to do better.
The numbers are not that surprising; Sunlife remains number 1 in both sales performance and total premium income, AIA comes in as a good second and the top 3 is completed by AXA. To make it a little bit more dynamic I've included the "growth momentum", which provides an indication of the direction the company is moving in, based on the market share development over the past year. Green means growth, red decline and gray a more or less stable market share while the number in the circle is the growth percentage of the market share. The fastest growing has been FWD, seeing its market share growing to 4.8%, 28% higher than the share in 2017, the company with the largest decline on the other hand is Manulife, experiencing a drop in its market share to 9.3%, 17% lower than the share in 2017.
Looking at the development year on year does in general not show significant changes and more years should be prepared to draw conclusions. This became apparent when I was looking at some files from 2000, the time that Philam had a 32% market share, Sun Life 23% and Insular 21%. I know it is almost a full generation ago, but I wonder how the CEO's and their teams from then reflect on the choices they made that resulted in their company's market share to go down to half or even to one-fifth of what they held those days.
Maybe they also only looked at the numbers year on year, maybe they also just tried to find rankings that would put them on Top (like the largest Filipino owned, the number 1, the fastest growing) or was profitability their main target and was market share and penetration not seen yet as the main objective. On this day where a loss making business is valued at 75 billion dollar on the basis on being in the best position to rule the market for taxi rides, that's hard to imagine.
All I can say is that it is worth having a good look at what is happening around you and creating a vision of the future. Pru UK and AXA both had market shares under 3% in 2000 and are now strongly anchored in the top 5, FWD and Allianz are clearly coming your way too and I'm convinced that others will follow and when I look at the charts in 2025 some of the names might have vanished from the Top 10.