Immaturity of Emerging Markets Deters Efficiency

The unique nature of emerging markets prevents volume savings, making forays into these markets costly.

In terms of opportunity, if you take the most mature markets in the world -- the U.S., U.K., Germany and France -- they also happen to be the most litigious societies in the world. So quite frankly, as laws change, the need for insurance also changes. Those markets, even though they may be mature, remain very dynamic. For companies that have a history of product innovation, those mature markets are just as important, if not more important, as emerging markets.

In dealing with China specifically, at this time the risk is with the immaturity -- the governance, regulations, the markets themselves are immature and changing at a pace that's dizzying and almost impossible to keep up with. On the IT side of that, because those new markets are immature, each sale, each product, each entry into that new market tends to be unique, so it becomes very difficult to contain costs. From an IT perspective, my value, what I can produce in an emerging market -- you don't have volume savings.

The only way to enter into new markets is to leverage what you have and to leverage your strengths. I don't know how a carrier would go into an emerging market without leveraging what it does well. Otherwise it just would be too cost-prohibitive.