Group CEO Message

The origins of the Sompo Group date back to 1888, when Japan’s first fire insurer, Tokyo Fire Insurance, was established. For more than 130 years, while dealing with complex risks and issues, we have strived to meet the expectations of our stakeholders, including customers, society, shareholders, business partners and colleagues to deliver a future of health, wellbeing and financial protection. Throughout and looking ahead, we continue to build Sompo Group’s resilience to be able to deliver value for society and for people, under any conditions.

The keys to building our resilience as a company are our corporate culture and professionals’ growth.It is vital that we create a culture that develops a deep understanding of the importance and significance of professionalism at work, based on constantly learning and achieving one’s own aspirations. Under a new management structure comprising the SOMPO P&C and SOMPO Wellbeing business segments, we will strengthen our efforts to ‘connect and be connected’and learn from each other across the group so that we can become ‘a Japan-born, truly global company.’

My aim is to ensure the growth of the Sompo Group as a stronger and more innovative enterprise by leveraging our diversity, increasing our resilience, and fostering a corporate culture where we learn from each other across geographic and business boundaries.
This will help achieve the future of health, wellbeing and financial protection that we want to pass on to the next generation.

Resilience is essential to delivering ‘a future of health, wellbeing and financial protection’

In 1888, when Sompo’s predecessor Tokyo Fire Insurance was founded, frequent fire occurrence had become a major social issue, and the company’s aim was to give people greater peace of mind. The modern world in which we live is filled with risks and anxieties amid a stream of previously unimaginable events, such as rising geopolitical tensions, climate change, and the advent of dramatic technological changes, including AI.

To take climate change as an example, the increased severity and frequency of natural disasters pushed related economic losses in FY2024 to US$318 billion, a critical situation for the industry. The global revenue base required to offset such losses is insufficient, which has resulted in a hard market and surging premiums, while the market has recently shown signs of moderating. This market trend, as one of the factors, is widening the so-called protection gap, where customers find it harder to secure coverage for natural disasters and to access services. We need to recognize this as a major social issue that the insurance industry must face.

The demographic shift is another looming issue. In Japan, we are facing various problems due to the rapidly aging society caused by low birthrates and increased longevity. Estimated medical expenses rose to more than ¥47.3 trillion in FY2023, around 20% higher than a decade earlier. As a result, increasing anxiety about the sustainability of the health care insurance system and the long-term care insurance system is spreading not only among the elderly but also among young people.

Preserving the company’s founding concept of delivering peace of mind, the Sompo Group today is working towards ‘a future of health, wellbeing and financial protection’ for a society confronting complex issues. To satisfy the expectations of customers, society, shareholders, business partners, colleagues and other stakeholders by earning the trust of everyone and consistently delivering peace of mind, it is essential that we build the resilience of the Sompo Group. In other words, everybody in the Group needs to combine strength with flexibility.

This is not simply about increasing revenues or boosting profitability using more advanced business models or insurance underwriting. In a broader sense, resilience means creating an organization that is flexible enough to respond to varied conditions.

Corporate culture and ‘My Purpose’ as the keys to building resilience

Progress with current MTMP

The goals of the Mid-Term Management Plan (MTMP) that we announced in May 2024 are to ‘increase resilience’ and to ‘connect and be connected.’ We set financial performance targets for FY2026 of adjusted consolidated ROE of 13–15% and a CAGR over the period for adjusted EPS of at least 12% (both on an IFRS basis), based on achieving growth within the two business segments of SOMPO P&C and SOMPO Wellbeing. Adjusted consolidated profit in FY2024, the first year of the plan, reached ¥334.3 billion (Japanese GAAP basis), a record high significantly ahead of initial guidance that was mainly driven by higher earnings in our overseas insurance business. On an IFRS basis, we expect adjusted consolidated ROE in FY2025 of about 10% and a CAGR for adjusted EPS over the current MTMP period of over 14%. We remain focused on hitting all these performance targets.

Moreover, our commitment is to raise adjusted consolidated profit to the ¥500 billion level and market capitalization to the ¥6 trillion level by FY2030, by reallocating capital realized from the sale of strategic shareholdings to fund growth investments and businesses with higher earnings potential. While these targets are double the level of what we first announced at the start of the MTMP in 2024, the focus is on ensuring we achieve our goals by realizing strong and steady growth.

In 2024, to support these efforts, we established Centers of Excellence (CoEs) staffed with highly talented people with a global perspective in areas such as finance, communications and internal audit. Their role is to apply the knowledge and know-how from our overseas insurance businesses to Sompo Group P&C insurance operations in Japan.

New management structure to support development of ‘a Japan-born, truly global company’

Targets for SOMPO P&C and SOMPO Wellbeing

At SOMPO P&C, in addition to expanding geographically and diversifying, we are expanding the scope of services we offer before and after insurance, including disaster prevention and mitigation, accident prediction, and emergency responses. We see this helping us to forge deeper customer relationships over the long term. To this end, we are focused on cross-border learning and development of best practice from every company across the global Sompo Group. For instance, through its SJ-R project designed to reform business models and corporate culture to address a series of problems, Sompo Japan Insurance aims to change its earnings structure and operating foundation, moving away from its traditional business model to create an innovative and highly resilient company. One of the key challenges of this project is how to transform the insurance underwriting portfolio. To date, we have applied know-how acquired from Sompo International to develop mechanisms to support sophisticated underwriting and timely rate revisions.
Under Mr. Shea’s leadership, the P&C business segment will pursue such initiatives driven by our Centers of Excellence.

In 2024, we announced SOMPO Wellbeing will focus on providing solutions to the three major concerns in modern Japan arising from its demographic trends. As a result of the efforts of past generations to realize major improvements in medicine, food and public health, life expectancy in Japan has increased by over 30 years, from around 50 in the late 1940s to today, where we can expect to live to 80 or even 100. Yet, as birthrates fall and society progressively ages, the longevity that we should all celebrate has spurred several anxieties. We refer to these as the ‘three concerns’ of health (can we stay healthy as we get older?), senior care (will care services be available when we need it?), and retirement finance (can we afford to retire?). I believe we must harness the collective power of the Group to alleviate these concerns. Under the leadership of Mr. Oba, who led Sompo Himawari Life for many years, SOMPO Wellbeing will become a pillar of Group earnings by steadily building its business through the provision of solutions that alleviate these concerns.

Helping the next generation inherit a better society