Prudential is Vietnam’s biggest insurer, with 39 per cent of the market, drawing equal in the first half of this year with the former State insurer Bao Viet.

The business caters to the strong Vietnamese emphasis on family ties. It markets its products as helping savers in their old age to provide for their children and grandchildren.

A turbulent political history means that Vietnamese people also place high emphasis on community support.

To play its part in the community, PCA runs the country’s most high-profile financial education campaign. The company is a large employer — just five of its 1,500 staff in the country are non-Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, there has been a boom in retail investment, as Vietnam’s new official stock market captures public information. In the first few months of 2006, the Vietnamese, bitten by the trading bug, borrowed $150 million to invest in shares.

PCA has become the biggest fund manager in Vietnam. The Prudential Vietnam Fund Management Company, the country’s first 100 per cent foreign-owned fund manager, invests directly in Vietnamese businesses as well as the stock market, and in September floated its first company.

PCA has benefited from its close relationship with Vietnam’s socialist Government. The insurer helped Vietnam to establish its financial regulatory regime by drawing on the group’s experience of regulation around the world.

Being seen as a friend to Vietnam has paid off. The business was last year named the best foreign direct investment enterprise by Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment.

Patients pay

• Since 1980, spending by the Chinese Government dropped from 36% of total healthcare expenditure to 17 %, while patients’ out-of-pocket spending rose from 20% to 59%

  Source: BBC

  “Larger outpatient care [in India] is almost a private health sector monopoly.”

  Source: Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes, Bombay