Reliance Life Insurance net profit soars in Q2

Reliance Life Insurance Company has posted an over three-fold surge in its net profit to Rs 31 crore for the quarter ended  September 30.

The private sector insurer also saw its total funds under management grow by 16 per cent in the second quarter of current  fiscal to Rs 19,417 crore, Reliance Life said in a statement.

The total premium (net of reinsurance) for the July- September 2012 quarter was Rs 1,003 crore, said Reliance Life, part of Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group’s financial services arm Reliance Capital.

A surge of 276 per cent in Reliance Life’s net profit for the quarter to Rs 31 crore was a key contributor to an over 10-fold surge in Reliance Capital’s consolidated second quarter net profit from Rs 33 crore to Rs 401 crore.

On quarter-on-quarter basis, Reliance Life’s net profit grew by 63 per cent from Rs 19 crore in the quarter ended June 30, 2012.

The company had recorded its first full-year net profit at Rs 373 crore in the fiscal ended March 31, 2012. It sold over one million policies in 2011-12 and garnered a total premium of Rs 5,498 crore in that year.

Nippon Life, Asia’s largest private life insurer and seventh biggest globally with an asset size of USD 650 billion, holds a 26 per cent stake in Reliance Life, which it had acquired for over Rs 3,000 crore.

Recently, Nippon Life President Yoshinobu Tsutsui said it will put to use all its resources to help its Indian partner become the country’s top life insurance company.

While state-run LIC is the country’s largest life insurer overall, Reliance Life has been the largest private life insurance company in terms of number of policies (over nine million) for two consecutive years as on March 31, 2012.

However, Reliance Life was the country’s seventh largest private life insurer in terms of total new business premium and sixth in terms of individual new business premium for the last fiscal ended March 31, 2012.

At present, the company has a market share of 4.8 per cent of the private sector life insurance industry.