Category: 3. Business

TSX/NYSE/PSE: MFC     SEHK: 945

TORONTO, Nov. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ – Manulife Financial Corporation (TSX:MFC) and Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (M&M) today announced that the two companies have entered into an agreement to establish a 50:50 life insurance joint venture, subject to regulatory approval. This new venture will strengthen Manulife and Mahindra’s existing footprint in India and underscores their commitment to enhancing the financial wellbeing of customers in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets. The vision is to be the #1 life insurance company for rural and semi-urban India, and in serving urban customers through leadership in protection solutions.

The joint venture aims to offer long-term savings and protection solutions tailored to the diverse and growing needs of India’s population, in line with India’s “Insurance for All” vision by 2047¹. Combining Mahindra’s deep access and extensive distribution in rural and semi-urban areas with Manulife’s proven quality agency capabilities catered to urban customers, the joint venture will create long term value by driving customer centricity and leveraging new technologies.

This joint venture will expand on the strong collaboration between Manulife and Mahindra in India, following the successful launch of Mahindra Manulife Investment Management in 2020.  The total capital commitment from each shareholder is up to US$400 million (Rs 3,600 crores) and we expect each shareholder to invest US$140 million (Rs 1,250 crores) in the first 5 years. 

India: A compelling growth opportunity underpinned by strong megatrends

The life Insurance market has surpassed US$20 billion in new business premiums, growing at a 12% CAGR over the past five years². Yet, India continues to have a high protection gap and low insurance penetration, providing significant long-term growth potential. These tailwinds position India to become the world’s fastest growing life insurance market over the next decade, on track to become the fourth largest globally³. This growth is underpinned by robust GDP expansion, a rising middle class, and a supportive regulatory environment.

Manulife & Mahindra: A very strong partnership

“Today marks an important milestone as we seek to enter one of the world’s fastest growing insurance markets – India,” said Mr. Phil Witherington, President and CEO, Manulife. “This will further strengthen our diverse portfolio and positions us for tremendous growth in a mega economy of the future. We have a trusted partner in Mahindra Group, with whom we already have a successful asset management collaboration, and we see tremendous opportunity to build on our efforts by leveraging their deep distribution network alongside our industry-leading agency distribution and insurance expertise.”

Dr Anish Shah, Group CEO & Managing Director, Mahindra Group said, “Mahindra brand strength, deep distribution capabilities in rural and semi-urban India and execution excellence make life insurance a logical extension towards our goal of building a comprehensive financial services portfolio. Manulife is the best natural partner for us given their global capabilities in insurance products, underwriting and reinsurance. With a focus on leveraging technology the joint venture will build an efficient, customer-centric insurer in India. We are confident that this joint venture offers a very compelling opportunity to create meaningful value for our shareholders.”

Following today’s signing, the Manulife and Mahindra teams will work together to apply for an insurance license.

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP acted as legal counsel to Manulife. Kotak Investment Banking acted as financial adviser and AZB & Partners acted as legal counsel to Mahindra Group.

About Mahindra

Founded in 1945, the Mahindra Group is one of the largest and most admired multinational federation of companies with 324000 employees in over 100 countries. It enjoys a leadership position in farm equipment, utility vehicles, information technology and financial services in India and is the world’s largest tractor company by volume. It has a strong presence in renewable energy, agriculture, logistics, hospitality and real estate. The Mahindra Group has a clear focus on leading ESG globally, enabling rural prosperity and enhancing urban living, with a goal to drive positive change in the lives of communities and stakeholders to enable them to Rise.

Learn more about Mahindra on https://www.mahindra.com/X and Facebook: @MahindraRise/ For updates subscribe to https://www.mahindra.com/newsroom/press-release

About Manulife

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping our customers make their decisions easier and lives better. With our global headquarters in Toronto, Canada, we operate as Manulife across Canada, Asia, and Europe, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States, providing financial advice and insurance for individuals, groups and businesses. Through Manulife Wealth & Asset Management, we offer global investment, financial advice, and retirement plan services to individuals, institutions, and retirement plan members worldwide. At the end of 2024, we had more than 37,000 employees, over 109,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving over 36 million customers. We trade as ‘MFC’ on the Toronto, New York, and the Philippine stock exchanges, and under ‘945’ in Hong Kong.

Not all offerings are available in all jurisdictions. For additional information, please visit manulife.com.

Media Contact

Carl Wong
Head of External Communications, Asia, Manulife
[email protected]

Swati Khandelwal
Senior VP & Head, Group Communications, Mahindra Group
[email protected]

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:

This document contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the “safe harbour” provisions of Canadian provincial securities laws and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 including with respect to the expected benefits and outcomes of the joint venture. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements.

Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include but are not limited to: changes in general economic and market conditions, laws and regulations; the expected benefits of the joint venture; and the receipt of regulatory approvals.

Additional information about material risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations may be found in our most recent annual and interim reports and elsewhere in our filings with Canadian and U.S. securities regulators.  The forward-looking statements in this document are, unless otherwise indicated, stated as of the date hereof. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

SOURCE Manulife Financial Corporation

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The new era of Silicon Valley runs on networking—and not the kind you find on LinkedIn.

As the tech industry funnels billions into AI data centers, chip makers both big and small are ramping up innovation around the technology that connects chips to other chips, and server racks to other server racks.

Networking technology has been around since the dawn of the computer, critically connecting mainframes so they can share data. In the world of semiconductors, networking plays a part at almost every level of the stack—from the interconnect between transistors on the chip itself, to the external connections made between boxes or racks of chips.

Chip giants like Nvidia, Broadcom, and Marvell already have well-established networking bona fides. But in the AI boom, some companies are seeking new networking approaches that help them speed up the massive amounts of digital information flowing through data centers. This is where deep-tech startups like Lightmatter, Celestial AI, and PsiQuantum, which use optical technology to accelerate high-speed computing, come in.

Optical technology, or photonics, is having a coming-of-age moment. The technology was considered “lame, expensive, and marginally useful,” for 25 years until the AI boom reignited interest in it, according to PsiQuantum cofounder and chief scientific officer Pete Shadbolt. (Shadbolt appeared on a panel last week that WIRED cohosted.)

Some venture capitalists and institutional investors, hoping to catch the next wave of chip innovation or at least find a suitable acquisition target, are funneling billions into startups like these that have found new ways to speed up data throughput. They believe that traditional interconnect technology, which relies on electrons, simply can’t keep pace with the growing need for high-bandwidth AI workloads.

“If you look back historically, networking was really boring to cover, because it was switching packets of bits,” says Ben Bajarin, a longtime tech analyst who serves as CEO of the research firm Creative Strategies. “Now, because of AI, it’s having to move fairly robust workloads, and that’s why you’re seeing innovation around speed.”

Big Chip Energy

Bajarin and others give credit to Nvidia for being prescient about the importance of networking when it made two key acquisitions in the technology years ago. In 2020, Nvidia spent nearly $7 billion to acquire the Israeli firm Mellanox Technologies, which makes high-speed networking solutions for servers and data centers. Shortly after, Nvidia purchased Cumulus Networks, to power its Linux-based software system for computer networking. This was a turning point for Nvidia, which rightly wagered that the GPU and its parallel-computing capabilities would become much more powerful when clustered with other GPUs and put in data centers.

While Nvidia dominates in vertically-integrated GPU stacks, Broadcom has become a key player in custom chip accelerators and high-speed networking technology. The $1.7 trillion company works closely with Google, Meta, and more recently, OpenAI, on chips for data centers. It’s also at the forefront of silicon photonics. And last month, Reuters reported that Broadcom is readying a new networking chip called Thor Ultra, designed to provide a “critical link between an AI system and the rest of the data center.”

On its earnings call last week, semiconductor design giant ARM announced plans to acquire the networking company DreamBig for $265 million. DreamBig makes AI chiplets—small, modular circuits designed to be packaged together in larger chip systems—in partnership with Samsung. The startup has “interesting intellectual property … which [is] very key for scale-up and scale-out networking” said ARM CEO Rene Haas on the earnings call. (This means connecting components and sending data up and down a single chip cluster, as well as connecting racks of chips with other racks.)

Light On

Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris has pointed out that the amount of computing power that AI requires now doubles every three months—much faster than Moore’s Law dictates. Computer chips are getting bigger and bigger. “Whenever you’re at the state of the art of the biggest chips you can build, all performance after that comes from linking the chips together,” Harris says.

His company’s approach is cutting-edge and doesn’t rely on traditional networking technology. Lightmatter builds silicon photonics that link chips together. It claims to make the world’s fastest photonic engine for AI chips, essentially a 3D stack of silicon connected by light-based interconnect technology. The startup has raised more than $500 million over the past two years from investors like GV and T. Rowe Price. Last year, its valuation reached $4.4 billion.