Driving Growth through a Disciplined Approach to Strategic M&A
Nigel Frudd
Senior Executive Vice President, Chairman of Overseas M&A,
Sompo Holdings, Inc.
and Executive Director & CEO, Sompo International Holdings Ltd.
Building Scale and Scope
We continue to take a disciplined approach to strategic M&A activities to build scale and scope in support of Sompo Holdings’ vision of becoming a top 10 insurance company. Whether organically or through acquisitions, investments or strategic partnerships, we are seeking opportunities to diversify and expand our overseas insurance platforms.
Building on Shared Expertise
We see significant movement in the P&C market and are very well positioned to take advantage of these changes, which will include “transformational” deals.
We are also committed to pursuing transactions that build on the shared expertise, technology, and scale offered by the entities that have come together to form our integrated Retail Insurance platform. However, our recent M&A activities have focused on expanding our Commercial P&C platform, which continues to lie at the heart of our growth engine. Our Commercial P&C platform is built on a foundation of technical expertise and we are selectively targeting opportunities for growth that add to its value.
Expanding Our Commercial P&C Platform
In fiscal 2018, we made progress toward these goals by successfully pursuing attractive opportunities to expand into businesses that complement our Commercial P&C offerings, creating greater diversification and reducing volatility. Through a number of strategic partnerships with industry leaders, we continue to enhance AgriSompo, our integrated agricultural insurance platform. We are jointly developing and delivering innovative insurance solutions together with SV SparkassenVersicherung (SV), one of the largest public insurance companies in Germany. Through our strategic partnership with CropTrak™, a leading provider of technology solutions for the food and agriculture markets, we are providing advanced insurance and risk management solutions to growers, insurance agents and agri-businesses around the world. We have also expanded the scope of A&A, S.r.l., our wholly owned subsidiary acquired in March 2018, so it now operates as a multi-mandate insurance agency offering a broader range of agriculture insurance products to producers in the Italian market.
Leading the U.S. Surety Market
Further, with the integration of Lexon Surety Group (Lexon) into Sompo International complete, we have firmly established our company as a top 10 surety market in the United States. The acquisition of Lexon was attractive because Lexon’s strong distribution relationships and technical expertise in the surety and bond market are highly complementary to Sompo International’s existing product capabilities. We are committed to pursuing M&A opportunities which substantially accelerate the growth of our product portfolios with offerings that are additive to our existing operations.
