Prudential Adjusts Life Sales Mix

Prudential Financial Inc. is trying to hold down the level of guarantee risk linked to the U.S. individual life insurance policies it sells.

The Newark, New Jersey-based company let sales of variable life insurance policies increase to $55 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, from $25 million for the fourth quarter of 2016.

Sales of universal life policies without guarantees rose to $43 million, from $31 million.

Sales of term life policies, and of universal life policies with guarantees, fell to $85 million, from $127 million.

(Related: Prudential Jumps Into Indexed Annuity Market)

Prudential included individual life sales figures in a financial supplement it released along with its fourth-quarter earnings.

Prudential as a whole is reporting $3.9 billion in net income for the latest quarter on $15 billion in revenue, up from $293 million in net income on $13 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016.

Gross sales of individual annuities fell to 2.3%, to $1.6 billion, but sales of individual annuities through financial planners increased to $713 million, from $659 million.

Prudential's U.S. individual solutions division accounts for only about 15% of the company's revenue.

John Strangfeld, Prudential's chief executive officer, said Thursday, during a conference call with securities analysts, that Prudential is actively managing the composition of individual life sales as the environment evolves.

Mark Grier, the Prudential's vice chairman, said the company's drop in guaranteed universal life sales was "offset by higher sales across the other products, reflecting our product diversification strategy, and specific distribution and product actions we have taken."

Resources

A link to a recording of the earnings call is available here.

Links to the earnings release, the conference call presentation and the quarterly financial supplement are available here.

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