 |
|
| AIA’s reserves according to its first-half results |
AIA chief executive Mark Tucker has reason to be in a good mood as he steps out to greet Euromoney with a firm handshake in a boardroom in the insurance company’s AIA tower in central Hong Kong. The company reported record results for this financial year, beating all analysts’ predictions in announcing net profits under IFRS standards up 24% to $1.314 billion. Value of new business (VONB), the key metric by which Tucker has said he wants the company’s post-IPO performance to be judged, rose a consensus-beating $399 million (the most bullish guess was $375 million, from Morgan Stanley). That amounts to a 32% year-on-year rise.
Since the well-documented struggles the company faced before its initial public offering in October last year, including a halted first attempt at an IPO, declining performance figures, and the aborted attempted takeover by the UK’s Prudential, AIA has thrived. Tucker, 53, was group chief executive at Prudential until 2009 and built up that group’s Asian operations from 1994 to 2003. Since his appointment in July 2010 he has worked to bring AIA back to strength across the 15 markets in which it operates in Asia, with the advantage that the company owns 100% of its business in 14 of those markets (rather than the usual joint-venture structure).