Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question is from Suneet Kamath. Sir, your line is open.
Suneet Kamath - Sanford Bernstein
Thanks. Good morning. My question relates to the US business. I guess in the prepared comments, Dan, you referred to differences in terms of productivity of the entire sales force versus the new sales force, and it seems like the new sales force is doing much better than the combined. I'm just sort of curious about that because I would think that the guys that have been around for a lot longer, obviously have seen various economic cycles, I would think that they would be in a better position to make your sales pitch in terms of product affordability much better than the newer guys. So, I'm just wondering what's going on there?
Is it a situation like we saw a couple of years ago where, you had a couple of good years of sales and the experienced sales people just said, I'm going to sit back and take my recurring commissions and just not generate as much new business as I otherwise might have? So any color you could provide there would be helpful.
Dan Amos
I'm going to let Paul answer that, but I think what you just said was part of it.
Paul Amos
The basic answer is that the vast majority of our veteran associates spend time reenrolling their existing accounts after a certain period of time. So, they build up a certain block of accounts, they then go in based on the growth and the turnover in those accounts and write those people in that existing account as well as servicing those accounts.
Unfortunately, for many of them, those accounts have not only, not increased in size, but have decreased dramatically, especially in the smaller account sizes. So for our veteran associates, it is not about their ineffectiveness of their pitch or their ability to sell Aflac products. In fact, you are right. Over time, I believe our Aflac associates continue to get better and better. However, if they are not focusing to some extent on newer accounts to supplement the decrease in employees at our existing accounts, then I think that it has hurt them.
As Dan mentioned in some of his numbers, our new recruits are up, our new accounts and new accounts from new associates are up tremendously. So, we are seeing our new accounts and the opportunity for our business to be sold go extremely well. So, I do believe that it is a problem that is within our existing accounts that is directly correlated to the economic impact that this economy is having on those businesses, and is therefore outside of the veteran associates' control.
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