Today, life insurance is a huge component of American financial assets and old-age security, with roughly $18.4 trillion of total life insurance coverage in force in the U.S. at the end of 2010. A huge number of people are covered: There were more than 290 million policies in force that year — but that’s substantially fewer than in the 1990s, when nearly 390 million policies (with a total value of $9.4 trillion) were in force. In the U.S., Metlife Inc (NYSE:MET), Prudential, and American International Group Inc (NYSE:AIG) hold the lion’s share of life insurance policies, with nearly $2 trillion in total assets between them — $800 billion is held by Metlife Inc (NYSE:MET), $625 billion is held by Prudential, and American International Group Inc (NYSE:AIG) holds $556 billion.
Location, location, location
President Bill Clinton opened up the satellite Global Positioning System to civilian use on May 2, 2000, ushering in a new age of location-based services that have absolutely exploded in the smartphone era — in fact, most smartphones can now be classified as GPS devices, too.
Prior to Clinton’s order, military users might pinpoint locations to within 10 meters, while a civilian user would be lucky to get within 100 — not all that accurate for driving on crowded city streets. Despite that, the GPS device market, led primarily by Garmin and Trimble Navigation Limited (NASDAQ:TRMB) but also served by Tom Tom and Magellan, had already grown into an $8 billion market, primarily serving drivers and boaters. Trimble Navigation Limited (NASDAQ:TRMB) vice president Ann Ciganer was thrilled by the move, calling it “absolutely great for our business.”
The extant GPS companies could never have expected big competition from a company that was barely a start-up in 2000: Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), which launched its Maps feature in 2005 and added a real-time GPS navigation feature in 2009 to enhance its Android mobile operating system. The year Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Nav was released, the worldwide GPS technology market was worth roughly $30 billion, and about 150 million GPS systems were in use around the world. Today, virtually every single Android smartphone (there are more than 500 million of them) can be considered a GPS device, and this proliferation has undoubtedly hurt the sales of stand-alone GPS devices. Only 28 million personal navigation devices sold in 2012, and that number is now expected to dwindle to 17 million units by 2017.
The article How Wrong Can You Be About the Crash Still to Come? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.
Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter @TMFBiggles for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends American International Group and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of American International Group and Google and has the following options: Long Jan 2014 $25 Calls on American International Group.
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