Aflac Sells Greek Sovereign Debt, Reduces Perpetual Securities Exposure, Further Enhances Risk-Based Capital Ratio
finance.yahoo.com
Commenting on the securities transactions, Aflac Incorporated President and Chief Financial Officer Kriss Cloninger III stated, "It is our time-tested investment approach to carefully assess the credit quality of our portfolio and our investment concentrations on an ongoing basis. As a result of extensive credit analysis, we believed it was prudent to trim our exposures to Eurozone sovereign debt. As we've done in the past, we also concluded it was in our best interest to take advantage of opportunities to selectively reduce our holdings of perpetual securities.
"Although these transactions resulted in losses on a statutory accounting basis, we estimate they will add approximately 20 points to our risk-based capital ratio by reducing investment concentrations and reinvesting into higher-rated debt securities. As we have repeatedly discussed, our primary focus is to maintain a strong capital position. That is especially true today, given uncertainty in the global economic environment and the volatility of capital markets. As such, we will continue to assess the creditworthiness of issuers in our portfolio and manage our investments in a way that reflects our risk tolerance and the objectives we've set for earnings growth. In that regard, we continue to believe our objectives of increasing operating earnings per diluted share 9% to 12% in 2010 and 8% to 12% in 2011, before the impact of currency translation, are achievable." |
