Prudential plc

Prudential plc is a British multinational life insurance and financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in London in May 1848 as The Prudential Mutual Assurance Investment and Loan Association to provide loans to professional and working people.

Prudential's largest division is Prudential Corporation Asia, which has over 13 million customers across 12 Asian markets and is a top-three provider of life insurance in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. Its Prudential UK division has around 7 million customers and is a leading provider of life insurance and pensions in the UK. Prudential also owns Jackson National Life Insurance Company, which is one of the largest life insurance providers in the United States, and M&G Investments, a Europe-focused asset manager with total assets under management of £547 billion at June 2014.

In December 2013 Prudential acquired the Ghanaian life insurance company, Express Life, marking its entry into the African direct life insurance market. Prudential subsequently rebranded the business as Prudential Ghana. In September 2014, it purchased Kenyan life insurer Shield Assurance, rebranding the company as Prudential Kenya.

Prudential has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It had a market capitalisation of approximately £41,630 million as of 4 February 2015. Prudential has secondary listings on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Singapore Exchange.

History
1848 to 2000
The company was founded on 30 May 1848 in Hatton Garden in London as The Prudential Mutual Assurance Investment and Loan Association providing loans to professional and working people.

In 1854, the Company began selling the relatively new concept of industrial branch insurance policies to the working class population for premiums as low as one penny through agents acting as door to door salesmen. The army of premium collection agents was for many years identified with the Prudential as the "Man from the Pru".

It moved to its traditional home at Holborn Bars in 1879 and converted to a limited company in 1881. The building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, and is built of terracotta manufactured by Gibbs and Canning Limited of Tamworth (c.1878) — two of the same driving forces behind the Natural History Museum in London.

The Prudential Assurance Company Limited was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1924.

In 1986, Prudential acquired the American insurer Jackson National Life. In 1997, Prudential acquired Scottish Amicable, a business originally founded in 1826 in Glasgow as the West of Scotland Life Insurance Company, for £1.75bn.

In 1998, Prudential set up Egg, an internet bank within the UK. The subsidiary reached 550,000 customers within nine months but had difficulty achieving profitability. In June 2000 an initial public offering of 21% was made to allow for further growth of the internet business but in February 2006 Prudential decided to repurchase the 21% share of Egg. Egg was subsequently sold to Citibank in January 2007.

In 1999, M&G, a UK fund management company, was acquired.

In June 2000, the Company was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange to help focus on the US market.

2000 to present
In October 2004 Prudential launched a new subsidiary, PruHealth, a joint venture with Discovery Holdings of South Africa selling private medical insurance to the UK market.

In April 2008 Prudential outsourced its back office functions to Capita: about 3,000 jobs were transferred (1,000 in Stirling, 750 in Reading and 1,250 in Mumbai). This significant outsourcing deal, worth an estimated £722m over a 15-year contract, built on Prudential's existing relationship with Capita who took over its Belfast operation in 2006 along with approximately 450 employees in a smaller operational restructure.

On 1 March 2010, Prudential announced that it was in "advanced talks" to purchase the pan-Asian life insurance company of AIG, American International Assurance (AIA) for approximately £23 billion. The deal later collapsed and AIA ended up raising money in an IPO.

In December 2013, Prudential announced the purchase of Ghana’s Express Life Company. Express Life was subsequently rebranded as Prudential Ghana. .In April, Prudential launched two corporate responsibility initiatives to support education in Ghana: the Prudential Scholarship Programme for more than 500 senior high school students, in partnership with the NGO Plan Ghana; and a scheme to support actuarial science graduates.

In September 2014, Prudential purchased Kenyan life insurer Shield Assurance and rebranded it as Prudential Ghana, further expanding the company’s presence in Africa.

On 10 March 2015, it was announced that the CEO, Tidjane Thiam, would leave Prudential to become the next CEO of Credit Suisse. On 1 May 2015, it was announced that Mike Wells, head of the company's US business, would succeed Tidjane Thiam as CEO, on a pay package worth up to £7.5 million.

Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. The company wholly owns GEICO, BNSF, Lubrizol, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, Helzberg Diamonds, FlightSafety International, and NetJets, owns 26% of Kraft Heinz Company and an undisclosed percentage of Mars, Incorporated, and has significant minority holdings in American Express, The Coca-Cola Company, Wells Fargo, IBM and Restaurant Brands International. Berkshire Hathaway averaged an annual growth in book value of 19.7% to its shareholders for the last 49 years (compared to 9.8% from the S&P 500 with dividends included for the same period), while employing large amounts of capital, and minimal debt.

The company is known for its control and leadership by Warren Buffett, who is the company's Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Charlie Munger, the company's Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors. In the early part of Buffett's career at Berkshire, he focused on long-term investments in publicly traded companies, but more recently he more frequently bought whole companies. Berkshire now owns a diverse range of businesses including confectionery, retail, railroad, home furnishings, encyclopedias, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners, jewelry sales, newspaper publishing, manufacture and distribution of uniforms, and several regional electric and gas utilities.

According to the Forbes Global 2000 list and formula, Berkshire Hathaway is the fifth largest public company in the world. On August 14, 2014, the price of the company's 'A' shares hit $200,000 per share for the first time in the history of the company.

History
Berkshire Hathaway traces its roots to a textile manufacturing company established by Oliver Chace in 1839 as the Valley Falls Company in Valley Falls, Rhode Island. Chace had previously worked for Samuel Slater, the founder of the first successful textile mill in America. Chace founded his first textile mill in 1806. In 1929 the Valley Falls Company merged with the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company established in 1889, in Adams, Massachusetts. The combined company was known as Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates.

In 1955 Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates merged with the Hathaway Manufacturing Company which had been founded in 1888 in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Horatio Hathaway with profits from whaling and the China Trade. Hathaway had been successful in its first decades, but it suffered during a general decline in the textile industry after World War I. At this time, Hathaway was run by Seabury Stanton, whose investment efforts were rewarded with renewed profitability after the Depression. After the merger Berkshire Hathaway had 15 plants employing over 12,000 workers with over $120 million in revenue and was headquartered in New Bedford. However, seven of those locations were closed by the end of the decade, accompanied by large layoffs.

In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway after noticing a pattern in the price direction of its stock whenever the company closed a mill. Eventually, Buffett acknowledged that the textile business was waning and the company's financial situation was not going to improve. In 1964, Stanton made an oral tender offer of $111⁄2 per share for the company to buy back Buffett's shares. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $113⁄8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry. Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did). However, this put Buffett in a situation where he was now majority owner of a textile business that was failing.

Buffett initially maintained Berkshire's core business of textiles, but by 1967, he was expanding into the insurance industry and other investments. Berkshire first ventured into the insurance business with the purchase of National Indemnity Company. In the late 1970s, Berkshire acquired an equity stake in the Government Employees Insurance Company (GEICO), which forms the core of its insurance operations today (and is a major source of capital for Berkshire Hathaway's other investments). In 1985, the last textile operations (Hathaway's historic core) were shut down.

In 2010, Buffett claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made, and claimed that it had denied him compounded investment returns of about $200 billion over the subsequent 45 years. Buffett claimed that had he invested that money directly in insurance businesses instead of buying out Berkshire Hathaway (due to what he perceived as a slight by an individual), those investments would have paid off several hundredfold.

Zurich Insurance Group

Zurich Insurance Group Ltd. is a Swiss insurance company, commonly known as Zurich, headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland. The company is Switzerland's largest insurer. As of 2013, the group was the world's 75th largest public company according to Forbes' Global 2000s list, and in 2011 it ranked 94th in Interbrand's top100 brands.

Zurich is a global insurance company which is organized into three core business segments: General Insurance, Global Life and Farmers. Zurich employs around 60,000 people serving customers in more than 170 countries and territories around the globe. The company is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. As of 2012 its capital position was strong, with shareholders' equity of $34.494 billion.

History
The company was founded in 1872 as a marine reinsurance under the name "Versicherungs-Verein" (Insurance Association), a subsidiary of the Schweiz Marine Company. In 2000, after a number of acquisitions, it was unified to form one holding company – Zurich Financial Services.

In April 2012, Zurich Financial Services Ltd changed its name to Zurich Insurance Group Ltd. In a statement the Group explained the rationale behind the name change. "In recognition of this strategic focus, the reference to financial services in the company name has been replaced by indicating the insurance activity of the Group instead and to specify the purpose accordingly."

Core business segments

General Insurance
Zurich's General Insurance business serves individuals, small and medium-sized businesses and major multinational corporations with motor, home, and commercial products and services.

Global Life
Zurich's Global Life business offers life insurance, savings, investment and pension products. In the United States life insurance is issued by Zurich American Life Insurance Company with offices in Schaumburg, Illinois and New York City.

Farmers
Zurich's Farmers segment includes Farmers Management Services, which provides non-claims related management services to the Farmers Exchanges (not owned by Zurich), as well as the Farmers RE business which includes reinsurance assumed from the Farmers Exchange by the Group. Zurich’s Farmers Insurance Group is the third largest insurance group in the United States.

Corporate social responsibility
In 2009, Zurich was awarded Charity Times "Best Insurance Services" and was shortlisted again in 2010. In 2012 the Zurich Community Trust (UK) won the Cross Sector Partnership of the Year Award for its partnership with the treatment charity Addaction.

According to its website, Zurich Community Trust has donated over £60 million since 1972, with the goal of addressing key social issues. It has supported over 600 charities a year, making a measurable impact on the lives of over 80,000 people. Zurich was one of the first recipients of the Community Mark from Business in the Community which it has successfully retained for three years.

At a group level, the Z Zurich Foundation's mission is to help individuals and communities understand and manage risk, leveraging Zurich's core strengths as an insurer. Zurich is achieving this aim by working with long-term partnership with select non-profit organizations such as Practical Action, the Rainforest Alliance, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

In March 2012, Zurich reinforced its commitment to the Z Zurich foundation by making a substantial investment of $100 million.

In 2011, Zurich launched a free online resource – My Community Starter – designed to make getting involved in community activities more simple.

On 24 October 2002, Zurich North America hosted a ceremony at the 9/11 Tribute Center honoring the winners of its 2012 K.A.M.P. awards, a program created as a living legacy to the four employees killed on 9/11: John Keohane, Peggy Alario, Kathy Moran and Ludwig Picarro.

In March 2013, Zurich announced its global flood resilience program, which aims to enhance community flood resilience by finding innovative ways to increase the impact of disaster risk reduction efforts at community, national and global levels. The first country program is taking place in Mexico and Indonesia. To maximize the community impact of the program, Zurich has formed a strategic alliance with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).