SHANGHAI (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc., the world’s largest insurer, said it plans to sell life products in four more cities in China next year, tapping into the rising wealth of the country.“As the economy continues to improve, more business is coming to the marketplace and disposable income is increasing,” Martin Sullivan, head of the New York-based company, said in Shanghai at the annual meeting of the advisory council of the Shanghai mayor’s international business leaders.

AIG, founded in Shanghai in 1919, plans to set up two outlets in southern Guangdong province next year and two more in eastern Jiangsu province, Edmund Tse, senior vice chairman of life insurance, said yesterday. Based in Shanghai, the company has operations in 11 cities, including Beijing and Guangzhou.

China’s economic growth, averaging about 9 percent a year in the past decade, is luring global insurers including AIG and Prudential Plc to step up expansion. The companies are competing for a bigger slice of the country’s $2 trillion of household savings as its 1.3 billion people are turning more to private insurers to foot medical and retirement bills.

Insurance penetration, or premiums as a percentage of gross domestic product, reached 2.7 percent in China last year, according to data by Swiss Reinsurance Co. In the US, the ratio was more than nine percent.

AIG opened an outlet in the city of Zhongshan and another in Zhuhai in southern Guangdong province last month, Tse said.

The company, which has about 14,500 agents in Guangdong, will add as many as 1,500 in the province and 800 in Jiangsu, Tse said. The insurer had 23,000 agents in the country as of Dec. 31. China Life Insurance Co., the nation’s biggest life insurer, has more than 650,000 agents.

London-based Prudential and Toronto-based Manulife Financial Corp. have more than 10 branches in China with their venture partners. AIG is the only overseas insurer that has 100 percent ownership of its life business.

AIG earned 4.8 billion yuan ($609 million) in premiums selling life policies in the first nine months of this year, 4.7 percent more than a year earlier and the most among overseas-run operations. The life market, controlled 5.1 percent by foreign insurers, grew 13 percent to 317 billion yuan in the same period.

The company’s non-life premiums more than doubled to 542 million yuan in the nine months through September, as the total collected in China for this category rose 18 percent, to 114 billion yuan.