Axa Insurance History.
The company was founded in 1816 as Mutuelle de L'assurance contre L'incendie (the Ancienne Mutuelle).[4] It acquired Compagnie Parisienne de Garantie in 1978 and became Mutuelles Unies.[5] It went on to buy the Drouot Group in 1982, becoming Mutuelles Unies/Drouot. It adopted the AXA name in 1985.[5] The takeover of the American insurance company The Equitable, came in 1991.[5] It bought Union des Assurances De Paris (UAP), France's largest insurer, in 1996 becoming AXA-UAP for a while before reverting to the name AXA in 1999.[6] Then in February 1999 AXA acquired Guardian Royal Exchange.[7] In May 2000 AXA acquired all shares it did not already own in Sun Life & Provincial Holdings.[8] On 14 June 2006 AXA acquired the leading Swiss insurance company Winterthur Group from Credit Suisse for approximately €9 billion.[9]
According to a 2011 paper by Vitali et al., AXA was the second most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition with Barclays and State Street Corporation taking the 1st and 3rd position, respectively.[10][11] During May 2016 it announced it was to stop investing in tobacco shares and bonds and allow its portfolio of tobacco-related bonds to run off.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXA
