Insurance: Great Eastern makes offer for Tahun Insurance
Singapore's Great Eastern Holdings, itself a subsidiary of OCBC Bank, has been given the green light to make an offer for the general insurance business of Malaysia's Tahun Insurance.
A statement by the Singapore-based insurer said that its wholly-owned Malaysian subsidiary Overseas Assurance Corp. Bhd has made an offer - on undisclosed terms - to buy the general insurance business from Tahun which put the division on the market last month.
But the size of the deal raises eyebrows with Great Eastern saying that the deal would not qualify as a "major transaction" under Singapore's reporting rules.
Tahun - its name means "year" in Malay but it's probably more colloquially meant as "annual" - targets Malay customers who, as a class, are under-insured and lacking in awareness of insurance; many are also poor earning less than USD200 per month. However, increasing opportunities and education means that the Malay market is likely to be a significant growth area in the medium term.
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