Charlie F. Lowrey - Prudential Financial, Inc.
Analyst · Jimmy Bhullar with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question
Jimmy, it's Charlie. Let me talk about both Life Planners and then, as you mentioned, Life Consultants. So, in Life Planners, in Japan they were up 3%, but to your point, you are correct. There is some seasonality with regard to Life Planners. So, recall that transfers to sales managers generally happen twice a year, in the second quarter and the fourth quarter, and we had a very – we had a high number of LPs transferred this quarter, resulting in an increase in sales managers year-over-year by 11%. Now, that's good because these new sales managers will contribute to future recruits and continued LP growth. But they do lower the current LP count. We also had a higher number of secondees that were transferred to the bank channel. So there are a lot of ins and outs, especially in the second and fourth quarter, but the long-term average for POJ and, frankly, for Life Planners in general is about 2% to 4%. So if you look over a five-year period for all of Prudential International Insurance, the LP growth rate in total has been about 2% or so. So, slow and steady growth of 2% over the long-term is what you should anticipate. Now, with the Life Consultant count, that's a bit of a different story. So the Life Consultant count decreased by about 6% year-over-year, and this is due to the adherence of more stringent validation and recruiting processes that we put into effect and that we talked about last quarter. And that really has a double effect. The first is that there are more terminations from stringent validation requirements that are being enforced, but also with higher recruiting standards, you have less recruits. And it's tough to do this, because when you elect to do this, there's a bit of a J-curve of sorts. So while we were flat versus prior quarter, we're not yet at the bottom of the J-curve. And I think we said last quarter, it'll take really most of this year to get to the bottom. But we think we'll hit the bottom later this year, and it's exactly what we've done in several operations outside of Japan over the past eighteen months including Korea and Taiwan, going back to the basics and increasing the quality of the field. Now a proof point to what we're doing is the fact that while LC count, the Life Consultant count decreased by 6%, sales only decreased by 4% in this market. And therefore, what you'd expect to see and what you're seeing especially at first is that as you take off essentially the bottom of the Life Consultants, if you will, the ones that aren't performing well, you'd expect to see sales go down less than the Life Planner count. And that's exactly what we saw. That won't happen every quarter, but we did expect to see it in the first quarter and that's what we saw.