If you only followed the Nippon Steel company acquisition of US Steel you would see and hear politicians decry the lost of the ownership of the domestic steel industry. The cry would be that Nippon Steel should not be able to buy US Steel because ….. and both President Biden and President-elect Trump have agreed with no purchase. You may think that there is no industry that is ok for Japanese companies to buy. You would be wrong.

In an article by Anton Bridge of Reuters, Nippon Life Insurance is in the final stages of buying Resolution Life Holdings Inc. The deal is worth $8.2 billion and is the largest ever foreign acquisition by a Japanese insurer.

Nippon Life would purchase the shares it does not own from Blackstone Group LP and others and make Resolution Life a wholly owned subsidiary in the second half of 2025. The insurer would pay for the shares with cash in hand.

The desire for the deal is to buy growth as the Japanese market is shrinking and the population is aging.

This is the second purchase of an insurance company, Nippon Life paid $3.8 billion for a 20% share in Cambridge Financial.

In other insurance companies news, property and casualty insurer Tokio Marine Holdings bought specialty insurer HCC Insurance of $7.5 billion in 2015; in 2011 bought Delphi Financial and in 2008 bought Philadelphia Consolidated for $4.7 billion.

Resolution Insurance based in Bermuda is a closed-book insurer that purchases existing insurance policies from insurers in the US and other countries. Nippon Life has owned a 23% stake in the firm from 2019 with a purchase of $1.68 billion.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in all industries there are international competition but in some markets particularly financial as long as the largest players are domestically controlled, there is plenty of acquisitions that can happen without the political input. With your investments for companies that compete globally, but based in the US how does the government help or protect the interests of the company?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.