Valuation

In the alphabet soup of financial metrics, few are as obscure—or as revealing—as Embedded Value (EV). While equity investors worldwide obsess over PER and PBR, a handful of listed Japanese life insurers are quietly trading at 60 to 70 cents on the yen of their intrinsic worth, measured by a yardstick that almost nobody outside the insurance sector bothers to learn. That is about to matter. Japan’s interest-rate regime is shifting. Its population is ageing into a demographic structure that demands more, not less, private insurance. And the regulatory apparatus that suppressed insurer profitability for two decades is now, paradoxically, creating the conditions for outsized returns. Understanding why requires a detour through the peculiar economics of life insurance—and a valuation framework that most retail investors have never encountered. ...

Part 1 was the demographic case. Part 2 was the regulatory and activist landscape. This is the spreadsheet. Below book, almost everywhere The Tokyo Stock Exchange’s 2023 directive to companies trading persistently below book value landed on the banking sector like an indictment. Of 79 Japanese banks surveyed by S&P Global, just four had a price-to-book ratio above 1. Half of all Topix stocks still trade below book value, the same proportion as twenty years ago, compared with 3% of the S&P 500. ...