LIC is not only the world’s largest when it comes to home-market share with over 64.1 per cent of the total gross written premium as of 2020 but also the one that offers the highest return on equity at 82 per cent, apart from being the third-largest in terms of life insurance premium, says a Crisil report.
While for LIC the market share has been steadily declining–down from 100 per cent in the pre-2000 era to 71.8 per cent in 2016 and further down to 64.1 per cent in 2020, for SBI Life, which is the second-largest in the country, the same was only 5 per cent in 2016 and 8 per cent in 2020, Crisil said in a report prepared in November 2021 which is not yet made publicly available.
At 64.1 per cent or with a gross written premium (GWP) of USD 56.405 billion, LIC’s market share is unparalleled globally, with no other life insurer anywhere else enjoying such a high market share, says the report.
It attributed this to the Corporation’s enormous agent network of 1.35 million individual agents as of March 2021 accounting for 55 per cent of the total agent network in the country and was 7.2 times the numbers of agents of the second-largest life insurer SBI Life has, strong track record, immense trust in the LIC brand and its over 65 years of lineage.
Market share elsewhere, the Chinese market is dominated by Ping An Insurance and China Life Insurance, with 21 per cent (GWP at USD 74.13 billion) and 20 per cent (USD 69.65 billion). The largest Japanese player Nippon Life’s market share is only 16.2 per cent (USD 39.84 billion).
However, nowhere else in the world is the market share gap between the largest and the second largest as stark as here, with the second-largest player SBI Life having only 8 per cent market share compared to LIC’s 64.1 per cent fiscal 2021, says the report.
