Mr. Smith: I am the Chairman and CEO of Summit Life Corporation headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. We are the parent of Great Midwest Life Insurance Company, which operates in Texas and Oklahoma. Historically, Summit Life Corporation incorporated in April 1994, specifically to operate as an insurance holding company. An insurance holding company owns and operates subsidiary insurance companies, and in our case, we do purely life and annuities. We don't do car insurance, home insurance, health insurance or other areas of the insurance field. Ours is life insurance and annuities. We did a private placement in April 1994 and raised $.5 million and bought our first shell company in the state of Oklahoma. We were approved by the Oklahoma insurance commissioner in September 1994 for the acquisition. Then we had to go through all of the policy filings and finally, in November 1994, we were able to write our first annuity contract. That's important. We raised $0.5 million as of November 1994, so we were basically a $0.5 million company. By the end of December 1994 the assets had grown to $1.1 million from an aggressive sale of new products. We continued selling annuities all through 1995 and grew to $2.4 million by the end of 1995. In 1995 we acquired Family Benefit Life in the state of Texas. That particular acquisition allowed us to enter the Texas market at a very low cost, from the standpoint of capital and surplus. In 1996 we did another private placement, raised another $0.5 million and began to pursue a company in Louisiana that we closed on in January 1997. At that point, we had grown to around $4.5 million, in total assets. With the addition of Benefit Capital, we finally reached over $6 million in size and we operated three separate insurance companies until January 1999, when we did our initial public offering and acquired Great Midwest Life Insurance Company in Texas. We then began to consolidate companies, merging Family Benefit into Great Midwest in February 1994 and finally, gaining authority for Great Midwest to operate in Oklahoma, giving it a two state charter. We then merged Summit Life and Annuity, our Oklahoma subsidiary, into Great Midwest Life. This effectively eliminated Summit Life and Annuity as a charter in Oklahoma and Family Benefit Life Company in Texas, leaving us with Great Midwest Life Insurance Company as our flagship company and still owning the Louisiana company. For us to merge the Louisiana company in, would require us to increase the capital surplus to $3 million in Great Midwest Life. And that was not economically feasible at that time, so we sold the Louisiana company, leaving us with Great Midwest Life operating in Oklahoma and Texas, which is our present corporate structure. We acquired another block of business in 2001 by acquiring all of the life business of Presidential Life Insurance Company in Texas. That acquisition was completed in August 2001. This tripled our life policy count, doubled our annualized life premium and increased the assets of the subsidiary company by 11%. That was a nice acquisition for us and it is exactly in line with Summit's growth model. The holding company finds and acquires small operating life insurance companies, generally $1.5 to $1.7 million in assets, with $150- $200,000 worth of ongoing life premium. We're in a market where we have very little competition because the big companies, the American Generals, the AIGs and the Consecos, make $500 million acquisitions. For them to look at the companies we go after is not feasible for their operation because it' s not even a blip on their radar screen, as far as having an effect on their bottom line. Summit Life Corporation now is a Bulletin Board, publicly traded stock. The insurance subsidiary is wholly owned by Summit Life Corporation and it continues to operate and grow very satisfactorily. So that's where we stand now.
Tickers included in this excerpt: SUMC
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

