| Full Year 2006 Prudential PLC Earnings Conference Call - Final
OPERATOR: Welcome to today's Prudential 2006 full year results call. Today, I am pleased to present Mark Tucker. [OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS]. Mr. Tucker, please begin. MARK TUCKER, GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE, PRUDENTIAL PLC: Thanks Hugh, and good afternoon everybody and welcome to our full year conference call. Just to say I am joined by Philip Broadley, our Group Finance Director and Nick Prettejohn, our CEO of our U.K. Insurance Operations here today. I think you will have seen the press release this morning. So what I intend to do is only make some brief introductory comments and then hand back to you guys for questions. If you look at our results, I think, you can see from the announcement and, I think, the reaction is that this is an excellent set of results and the business is performing very strongly in all of our markets.
Time is right to tackle contentious pensions issue
The election will not be won or lost on the basis of policy on pensions. Yet, few issues will have a bigger impact on the long-term welfare of a large number of people.
The long-term bit is why pensions are not politically sexy, of course the essence of pensions, after all, is to put away some of your own money to benefit you many years hence. However, pensions - and particularly the poor provision of many in the private sector are now on the political agenda and Labour and Fine Gael are set to put new approaches forward as part of their election packages.
The essence of the problem is simple. Almost one million people in the private sector have no personal pension at all, leaving them dependent on social welfare when they retire. .
T. Rowe gets into 401(k) annuities
Mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price said it has started offering 401(k) plans an online platform that participants can use to purchase annuities. Two other 401(k) plan providers, Hewitt Associates and CitiStreet, already make the platform, Income Solutions, available to the 401(k) plans they work with. And last October, Fidelity Investments launched a somewhat similar product, Fidelity Lifetime Income Solutions.
Efforts to provide an annuity option to 401(k) participants are part of a growing focus on ensuring that employees have access to a guaranteed stream of income in retirement, particularly as defined-benefit pension plans fade away and Social Security gradually replaces less of workers pre-retirement incomes.
Matthew DiLiello, senior product manager at T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services, said Income Solutions provides 401(k) participants with a good mix of competitive shopping, institutional rates and choice in terms of insurance providers.
US pension fund hikes investment in Indian markets
New Delhi: The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest pension fund in the US, has found India to be one of the best performers among all the emerging markets in its investment policy report for 2007, approved by its board yesterday. Currently, CalPERS has investments of about $1 billion in over 55 Indian stocks, which represents a whopping over 260 per cent return since the purchase of these stocks. CalPERS may also expand its exposure to the Indian stock market, as it has given impressive returns ever since the world's second largest pension fund with assets worth about 240 billion dollars began investing here in 2004. For 2007, CalPERS board has decided it might invest in twenty emerging markets including Argentina, Brazil, India, Israel, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey.
Pension plan details emerge
For some retirees, the late-night decision Tuesday by the Battle Creek City Commission on a health insurance issue is a nightmare, while for others, it's better than expected. But the impact on city services, which could lose $240,000 in funding, remains to be seen. .
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