Mumbai, June 9 : As the spread of Coronavirus crippled the economy, the growth of insurance business in the first two months of this financial year registered a decline of 30.7 percent as compared to the corresponding period last year.
The Industry saw a contraction of about 25 per cent in insurance premium during the same period as compared to last financial year.
However, leading insurance company, Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) saw a rise in some aspects of its business even as traditional form of operations suffered a growth decline during the lockdown ordered by the government to contain the spread of Coronavirus.
According to latest IRDAI data released now, LIC’s new business premium registered a 24 per cent drop to Rs 10211 last month as against the corresponding period last year. As compared to April this was 185 per cent revival.
The data showed that the Individual and total Annualized Premium Equivalent bounced back by more than double than the April levels.
LIC witnessed only 3 per cent decline in individual Annualized Premium Equivalent (APE) in May this year which is significantly better than the private insurance companies.
New Business Premium is the premium acquired from new business policies for a particular year where as APE is a method of ascertaining the business sales in the life insurance industry.
The number of policies sold by the insurers dropped by almost half to 6.25 lakhs in May 2020 against the corresponding month last year. The private companies sold 2.18 lakh policies in the same month which fell about 19 per cent compared to corresponding month last year.
