Prudential Financial has agreed to sell its Brazil and Mexico units to CNP Assurances Group of France for 4.03 billion dollars in cash, the US insurer said on Tuesday. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2027.
The sale extends a deliberate retreat. Prudential has already divested operations in Indonesia, South Africa and Kenya, and chief executive Andy Sullivan said in August that the group planned to cut the geographic footprint of its retirement and insurance businesses from more than a dozen countries to about half that number. Announcing the deal, Sullivan said the company remains focused on narrowing its footprint and building a simpler, more focused Prudential. The group had about 1.6 trillion dollars of assets as of June 30.
Prudential will use the proceeds to invest in growth in retirement, asset management and selected protection businesses in the United States, Japan and selected European markets. Morgan Stanley advised Prudential and Goldman Sachs advised CNP.
For CNP, a French insurer with a mutual and public ownership heritage, the purchase is a diversification step in Latin America, buying established life and retirement books in the region’s two largest economies from a seller that no longer wants them. The opposing strategies are the story: the same assets are non-core complexity to the seller and geographic scale to the buyer, and the 4.03 billion dollar price is where those two views met.