The employees of Paul -AFLAC Company all call it "Mr. Paul"-thinking that the success of the company is due to the fact that the three brothers did not "adhere to the traditional routine of insurance business". They let their ideas play freely and think about business in new and different ways. Therefore, just as ray kroc discovered the secret of selling hamburgers, sam walton found the way to run the retail industry, and john amos discovered the real innovation of the insurance industry. In 1970s, AFLAC grew steadily and rapidly, and then it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but its business was still mainly concentrated in the south, and its products were single. At this time, the company has its headquarters in Columbus, and john amos has become a local big shot. He is always famous for wearing a white three-piece suit. He and his brothers accomplished what they wanted to accomplish when they came to Columbus: start a company and make a fortune.

However, this is not enough, at least John and Paul think so (Bill retired in the late 1970s). This is not to say that they are greedy (Amos are very generous philanthropists), but because there is a force in their hearts that drives them to find and conquer new fields and build a big company-not only in Columbus or Georgia, but also in the United States. To this end, AFLAC is fully committed to the Japanese market. 1970, john amos visited the Osaka World Expo. There, he saw the Japanese in the whole city wearing white surgical masks. When he asked why, he learned that the Japanese did it to avoid catching cold. He immediately thought: people with such a strong sense of health must welcome the opportunity to buy supplementary cancer insurance. He's right.

At that time, Japan did not allow foreign insurance companies to operate. After four years of struggle, AFLAC became the first foreign insurance company to obtain a business license from the Japanese government after the war. Paul Amos believes that this is because the company was so small that no one thought it would succeed. You gain something, you lose something. When you grow into a Fortune 500 company, you will also lose something. You must establish a system that can eliminate mistakes, but at the same time, it also reduces humanized communication. You must obey the rules, but it also encourages bureaucracy. If not impossible, it is difficult for the CEO to know everyone in the company. When the company becomes too big, many valuable traditions will be unsustainable. All this inevitably happened in AFLAC.

Old employees still remember that john amos's wife brought her homemade ice cream to the company to share with the employees, and John and Paul would fry the fish they caught from the deep sea for everyone to eat. John amos used to live in a house on the top floor of the company parking lot. He always wants to be near his office. Now it's empty. People remember how sad they were when John died. They always mention the company's past: it is small, but it is like a family. They miss those days. The hype made AFLAC a household name. AFLAC is a Fortune 500 insurance company that has won public attention through TV publicity, providing renewable accident insurance and disability insurance for 40 million people around the world, and it is also the largest insurance company in Japan.

AFLAC (short for Columbus Family Life Insurance Company) is located in Cambus, Georgia, with more than 60,000 agencies and nearly 4,200 employees. AFLAC is good at paying customers various expenses that are not covered by the main medical insurance through insurance, including * * * co-payments, deductible expenses, loss of income and various expenses that need to be paid in cash.

The main goal of the company's IT department is to keep up with the pace of business growth. With the help of DB2 and MOST, we will be able to provide real-time information and quickly develop productivity-enhancing applications to handle more business. -—Gerald Shields, vice president of AFLAC AFLAC Company 1955 was founded by three brothers, John, Bill and Paul. None of them have any experience in the insurance industry, but they decided to invest only $40,000 to create the first insurance company in the world to sell supplementary cancer insurance. Their goal is: annual income of 654.38+0,000,000 dollars. The early days were difficult, colleagues were not optimistic, and the company's funds were also very tight. Paul said that in the most difficult time, their brother once sold all the office furniture for much-needed cash and then rented it back. John, the flamboyant CEO-it should be "Mr. John" for employees-is a guy who wears a white linen suit all year round, smokes Marlboro cigarettes and sleeps only four hours a night. Bill is in charge of finance, while Paul is in charge of sales.

John visited the World Expo held in Japan in 1970, which was a great event for AFLAC. There, he saw thousands of Japanese people wearing masks to protect their health, and he couldn't help secretly shouting, "Aha!" He found an ideal market. It took AFLAC four years to obtain a business license from the Japanese government, but the effort was worthwhile. Today, AFLAC has occupied about 85% market share of supplementary insurance in Japan, and has business dealings with 95% listed companies in Tokyo Stock Exchange. AFLAC is not only the most profitable insurance company in Japan, but also ranks third among the most profitable American companies in Japan, second only to Coca-Cola and IBM.

It sounds ironic that John died of lung cancer on 1990. His nephew Dan became the new CEO. Dan's growing experience doomed this result: he graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in insurance, then took part in the sales work of AFLAC and became a director of the company in Alabama. His father Paul said, "I designed a career development path for him." Dan returned to Columbus as president in 1983. Dan, 50, said, "It is not only money that drives me, but also the pride of the whole family." . After moving into the luxury suite, he also reduced his salary by 80%. Now, in his office on the 0/4th floor of AFLAC Building/KLOC-the tallest building in Columbus-there are photos of his family and, of course, plaster statues of ducks everywhere. This spring, the chairman Paul retired and handed over the position to Dan. AFLAC is not only the most profitable insurance company in Japan, but also ranks third among the most profitable American companies in Japan, second only to Coca-Cola and IBM.

Although Dan often wears a conservative suit, he is by no means the kind of person who wears a white linen suit. He proved that he took over his father's and uncle John's classes well. Under Dan's leadership, AFLAC's sales in Japan have reached nearly $8 billion, which Dan attributed to the unremitting efforts of the whole company. In addition, he also injected a booster into the business in the United States. AFLAC's 40,000 licensed agents in the United States sell insurance to small businesses (these companies usually have fewer than 50 employees). In the 1980s, AFLAC mainly sold cancer insurance, while Dan expanded its product line to include accident and disability insurance, which has now become the most popular insurance for the company. Take the dental insurance just launched last year as an example, and it has become the fourth best-selling insurance in the company. In fact, AFLAC is also widely known as a reformer in the insurance industry-it turns out that these two statements are not contradictory. In the past five years, the company's sales in the United States have increased rapidly at a rate of 265,438+0%.

At the AFLAC annual analysis conference held at the St. The Regess Hotel in new york, happy investors gathered in the room and listened to the speaker's annual report in American Southern accent or Japanese through the transmission equipment equipped with translators. And the whole Wall Street seems to be talking about the same thing about this company: these people are really great and their management is great. AFLAC, a profitable company from 1990 for many years, is also famous for its extensive and free communication with investors. "We use all possible methods to finish the task," Dan said. There is no doubt that this sentence adds a lot of color to this news. At the meeting, AFLAC announced that it would continue its efforts to increase its profit from 65,438+05% to 65,438+07% by 2003. "These people's words can be used as letters of credit for banks," said Greg Locraft, an analyst at MFS.

But this is not to say that everything is smooth sailing. The main challenge of AFLAC business comes from Japan. It is not only the economic crisis in Japan, but also the gradual liberalization of the Japanese government's restrictions on financial services. 200 1 year, for example, Japan Life and Tokio Marine & Fire, a large Japanese life and property insurance company, obtained the business license of supplementary insurance named "Part III". Therefore, the real worry is that a company with complete insurance protection and aggressive marketing strategy will attract customers from this Georgia company, and this worry also keeps AFLAC's share price at $37 at the beginning of 200 1 and drops to $25 at the end of March.

Since then, the company's share price has rebounded until it is close to $365,438 +0. Amos believes that Japanese competitors are not as competitive as he imagined, and their operating costs are almost four times that of AFLAC, which means that they have no potential in price competition. In order to prepare for the liberalization of the government, AFLAC signed an agreement with First Mutual Insurance Company, the second largest life insurance company in Japan, last autumn. First Mutual Life Insurance Company will not compete with this American company. On the contrary, it will use its sales team of 50,000 "insurance ladies"-similar to the sales staff of Miss Avon who sells AFLAC products door to door.

Due to the high share price, some analysts downgraded the company's stock rating. The price-earnings ratio of AFLAC shares is 23 times, while the price-earnings ratio of most insurance companies is only a dozen times (compared with AIG's price-earnings ratio of 30 times, AFLAC's share price is still low. In fact, the high share price shows that AFLAC is not mysterious. It is the largest shareholder of the National Association of Investors Corp., and ranks among the 500 constituent stocks of Standard & Poor's in 1999, which attracts the attention of every investment manager.

Although Dan doesn't want to talk about the price-earnings ratio of his stock, he doesn't seem to be worried about the company's business. His son, Paul Amos II, has just graduated from university and is proficient in Japanese, and will join the family business immediately. In early July, AFLAC introduced this duck to Japan. The duck's change from speaking English to speaking Japanese did not shake AFLAC's confidence at all. On this issue, everything about this duck is beautiful.