Claude Bébéar is the founder and former CEO of the insurance company AXA. I believe the AXA group is currently the third largest insurance company in the world (just behind Allianz and Generali Group). Bébéar built AXA through mergers and acquisitions, most notably the Drouot Group and the American insurer Equitable. More can be found about AXA at Wikipedia.

The following are some excerpts from a great interview of Bébéar done by Michael Villette (mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “The Sure Thing”). In the interview, Villette’s goal was to test the common belief that Bébéar took more risks than others (both in business and insurance), was a business innovator, and took advantage of others using insider “industry” information.

MV: Explain to me how starting in 1981 you managed to carry out an uninterrupted sequence of acquisitions in France and then in other countries. I would like an explanation with no magic, with facts and figures.

CB: There’s no magic in any of it, nothing extraordinary. The first coup was Drouot, which we bought at a bargain price, because of the panic after the left won the elections.

On the Drouot acquisition:

… the result: we acquired for 250 million francs a company that was valued at 5 billion francs four years later. . . .

MV: Why was Drouot worth so little to start with and so much later?

CB: It’s just like Equitable. People study the issues very poorly. They look at things superficially. Drouot was a company with a very good business that had done some stupid things in real estate. It was taken over hastily by Bouygues. Bouygues knew nothing about the profession of insurance, so he stuck with thinking like a financial analyst, that is, in the short term. He said to himself: “Oh, there’s a hole in this business, it’s terrible!” He didn’t see the value of the underlying business. We bought at a very low price because it seemed to be a company practically on the skids, but since we were insurance professionals, we restored the business immediately, we increased premiums, and so on, and the business took off very quickly. When we bought it, it was losing 200 million. The following year, the budget was balanced, and the third year it earned 200 million.

On the Equitable acquisition: Continue reading “Claude Bébéar, the Risk Avoider” →