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| Edited By: Nandini Goswami |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 17, 2018, 03:48 AM IST
SBI Life Insurance has posted a whopping Rs 276 crore net profit in 2009-10, as against a net loss of Rs 26 crore in the previous year.
The private life insurer crossed the Rs 10,000 crore mark in gross written premium, growing by over 40% during the year. Its assets under management jumped 96% to Rs 28,551 crore and new business annualised premium equivalent (APE) rose 37% to Rs 6,358 crore. It reported a 31% rise in new business premium of Rs 7,040 crore.
MN Rao, MD and CEO, SBI Life Insurance, said, “Our focus continues to be on achieving both growth and profitability objectives by catering to the life insurance needs of Indian population encompassing all socio-economical and geographical segments.”
While the agency channel contributed to 45% of the total premium, the bancassurance channel witnessed a growth of 59% and contributed to over 33% of the total premium. Group corporate contributed to 22% of the total premium.
Maintaining a balanced mix of market-linked and traditional products, unit-linked product inflows contributed to almost 65% of total premium collections.
The new fiscal is likely to see some expansion plans from SBI Life. “We have not firmed up plans, but as the economy improves, we could be looking at an expansion plan. This would neither be too aggressive or conservative but would be matching our growth projections. We’ve asked our field officers for prospective areas where we could grow,” Rao had told DNA recently.
However, it would be interesting to see how the Sebi-Irda standoff pans out for insurers, especially for big players like SBI Life, which was among the 14 companies under Sebi glare.
SBI Life has a current solvency ratio of 2.2 and share capital of Rs 1000 crore. It has a low “expense to gross written premium” ratio in the industry of 6.5%. The company has a market share of 18.34% among private life insurers and a total market share of 6.44%.
The company has been able to keep its costs low as it extensively leverages the State Bank Group relationship, which has an access to over 100 million customers. The insurer uses the parent bank as a platform for cross-selling insurance products along with its numerous banking product packages such as housing loans and personal loans.
