|
medical products in early 2005 and believe they will energize the sales force and engage more consumers.
We also continued to expand our distribution system in Japan. During the year, we recruited nearly 4,200 agencies, which exceeded our goal for the year. Although new sales declined through the Dai-ichi Life sales channel, we remain pleased with this relationship. We believe Aflac's market-leading cancer life policy and Dai-ichi Life's sales force has produced a tremendously successful marketing alliance. Since we established the alliance in 2001, Dai-ichi Life has sold 1.2 million of our cancer life policies.
We continue to believe that Japan is an ideal market for our products. Similar to the United States, Japan has quality medical care available to its citizens. But as the country has discovered, quality health care comes with an expensive price tag. In the last eight years, copayments on Japan's national health care system have increased from 10% to 30%. This steady shift of health care costs to consumers has increased the need for the products we sell. And with an aging population, it is likely that Japan's national health care system will continue to experience financial stress. That means consumers could bear an even greater financial burden for their health care in the future.
As we look ahead, the competitive strengths that have positioned Aflac as the number one insurance company in terms of individual policies in force are alive and well. We believe our products, distribution, efficiency, brand recognition, financial strength and customer service put us in a great position to capitalize on the opportunities in Japan's insurance market.
Aflac U.S. also met or exceeded all of our financial targets. But from a new sales perspective, we fell short of our target for the year. However, we don't attribute sluggish sales to a change in the market, the competitive environment, or the value of our product. Instead, we believe slower sales growth resulted from the extensive changes we made to our sales management infrastructure.
Following the launch of the Aflac Duck advertising campaign, we experienced explosive growth of our sales force from 2000 through 2002. We determined in 2003 that we needed to expand our sales management infrastructure to accommodate a much larger and growing distribution system. As a result, we significantly increased the number of sales coordinators who manage the activities of our sales force. We believe it has simply taken longer than we anticipated for our newly promoted sales coordinators to get their teams in place. However, we remain convinced that expanding our sales management base was critically important for the future growth of our business.
There is no doubt that to improve our reach into the market, we have to increase the size of our sales force. We believe one of the benefits of an expanded sales management team will be a larger and stronger structure from which to grow our distribution. With more sales coordinators, we have increased our capacity to recruit new sales associates. And while recruiting was weak for most of 2004, we had a solid increase in the fourth quarter of the year. At the same time, we recognize that we must do more than just recruit. It's critical for us to provide our new sales associates with the tools they need to become successful. As such, we are focusing intensely on sales associate training. And we will continue to refine and improve our classroom and field training programs to help sales associates and coordinators build successful careers with Aflac.
Perhaps the greatest change that took place in 2004 was in the area of branding. With name awareness of around 90% in the United States, Aflac is well-known to employers and potential customers. The Aflac Duck ads were specifically designed to improve our name recognition. In that regard, there is no doubt that the ads have worked. In a relatively short period of time, Aflac has emerged as a household name and the Aflac Duck has become a
|
