Interview Alex Wynaendts

Interview Alex Wynaendts >Expansion in China Expansion in India Expansion in Mexico Expansion in Romania

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Interview

Recently, AEGON has significantly expanded its international presence, pushing out into new markets that offer the prospect of strong growth in the years ahead. By 2010, these markets will be providing approximately a third of the Group’s new business.

Alex Wynaendts, AEGON’s Chief Operating Officer, explains how the Group is approaching these markets and talks about some of the opportunities opening up.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen very rapid growth in our international businesses. We’ve expanded our presence in Central and Eastern Europe, signed new partnerships in India and Japan, and further strengthened our operations in China. At the beginning of the 1990s, AEGON was present in just three markets: the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Today, we have businesses in more than twenty countries around the world, serving over 40 million customers.

This is not expansion for expansion’s sake. We’re not interested in simply planting flags in a map. In the years to come, these new markets will generate strong, sustainable, profitable growth for AEGON. By 2010, we estimate they will be providing around a third of our new business.

The fact is, there are tremendous opportunities opening up for us in these new, emerging markets. In many parts of the world, reform has brought economic prosperity and the rise of a new, ambitious middle class. India’s middle class, for example, already numbers 350 million, more than the total population of the United States. By the end of this decade, that figure could exceed half a billion. In China, we now have branches in five different locations, giving us access to a potential market of more than 200 million people.

Like China, Central and Eastern Europe was once a closed book for western insurance companies. Today, AEGON has businesses in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania. Here, pension reform has played a key role in encouraging new, private sector involvement in the region. Over the next eight years, it is estimated that investments in Central and Eastern Europe’s mandatory private pension funds will grow nearly five-fold to almost EUR 200 billion.

AEGON is now present in the Americas, Europe and Asia. What we’ve achieved so far will provide us with a great platform from which to expand our international operations even further in the years ahead. Making a success of this international strategy, however, means unlocking the benefits of being a global group, making the most not only of the financial resources we have, but also the tremendous expertise, knowledge and talent that we have within the Group. This will be my main mission when I take over as CEO in April: to lead a coherent, integrated group that can help people around the world build better futures for themselves and their families.”