Discovery team up with major in Hong Kong

Discovery Limited, what happened there, the stock was up 6.63 percent to close out at an all time high of 92 ZAR a share? It is now the 25th biggest company by market capitalisation listed on our exchange. Bigger than AngloGold Ashanti. Yes, really! Interesting coincidence, Life Healthcare is nearly bigger than Gold Fields. New economy globally is trending towards healthcare, as people want to maintain a healthy lifestyle and of course in Discovery's Vitality program incentivising them to do so. For instance in my personal case, I am both a member of their medical scheme as well as having life insurance with Discovery. If you quite simply do a whole lot of tests (easy ones), you can get paybacks for the "health integrator" systems. Significantly more if you lead a healthier lifestyle, as you can see this is great for the company that you are sharing your personal medical details with them. If they can tell that you are healthy, they don't mind incentivising you and giving you rebates on all sorts of things.


OK, that is all rather *nice* to share that with you, but what happened to Discovery yesterday? Why did the price go up so much? A fairly simple announcement: AIA and Discovery announce new joint venture. And quite simply, as per the release: "AIA Group Limited ("AIA") and Discovery Limited ("Discovery") today announced a strategic joint venture to introduce Discovery's successful wellness-based life insurance model to the Asia-Pacific region."


First question, the world is a big place (sometimes), so who are AIA? As per their website: "The largest, independent listed pan-Asian life insurance group in the world." Wow. The company is listed in Hong Kong, you can obtain more information from the Google Finance profile: AIA Group Ltd. It is big. 413 billion Hong Kong Dollars. That is roughly 525 billion Rands. A 90 year old business that uses the payoff line "real life never stops". Quite, this is true!


It is a huge company in a fast growing market in a part of the world where the middle class is growing at a serious click, and this is a major score for Discovery. Innovative is a word that you continue to associate with Discovery, their management team looks like the Saturday morning crowd on the road. But when they meet at the Vida later on, they eat nothing and have a skinny cafe latte without the sugar!