“TORONTO (Reuters) – Sun Life Financial Inc will sell its U.S. annuity business for $1.35 billion to a unit of asset manager Guggenheim Partners in a deal that should reduce the exposure of the insurer’s earnings to market swings and boost its cash levels.
Even so, shareholders pulled Sun Life’s stock down by 2.5 percent on Monday after the Canadian company announced the deal, which will reduce its book value and core earnings.
“The financial implications are more negative than we had assumed both in terms of the book value decline and the ongoing earnings impairment,” CIBC World Markets analyst Robert Sedran wrote in a research note.
Guggenheim’s Delaware Life Holdings unit will take on the business, which also includes some life insurance assets, and rename it Delaware Life Insurance Co.
New York-based Guggenheim, which has about $160 billion in assets under management, recently emerged as the lead bidder for the Sun Life assets, outbidding at least two other parties, sources told Reuters in November.
Sun Life, Canada’s No. 3 insurer, said last year it would stop selling variable annuities and individual life products in the United States to focus more on group insurance and voluntary benefits…”
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