Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) has posted a higher-than-industry growth of 51.86 percent year-on-year (YoY) in new business collection for the April to July 2019 period. LIC collected new premiums of Rs 60,106.66 crore for the period compared to Rs 22,039.81 crore collected by the private companies.
The life insurance industry collected Rs 82,146.47 crore in the April-July 2019 period, showing a 44.25 percent YoY growth. Among private sector players, Tata AIA Life had the highest growth rate at 91.79 percent YoY growth to collect new premiums of Rs 818.76 crore.
LIC's market share stood at 73.17 percent in terms of premium collection. The life insurer saw a premium growth across its business segments including individual and group business.
All the listed life insurance companies posted a double-digit growth in new premiums. HDFC Life Insurancecollected first year premium of Rs 5,384.79 crore in the four-month period, showing a YoY growth of 41.98 percent.
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance collected Rs 3,170.10 crore of new premiums, showing a 25.46 percent YoY growth in the April to July period. SBI Life Insurance collected new premiums of Rs 4,496.36 crore, a YoY growth of 35.45 percent.
This is a positive development considering that the first half of the financial year is usually a slow period of premium growth for the life insurance companies.
However, the number of new policies still remained flat showing a growth of 0.96 percent YoY growth to 70,00,277 policies in April-July 2019 period. This meant that while the number of new policies sold are not high, the ticket-sizes of the insurance products are going up.