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Leading private insurer Reliance Life has posted an over four-fold surge in its second quarter net profit to Rs 136 crore, helped by increased sales of traditional policies and better agent productivity.
The life insurer, which is a part of Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group's financial services arm Reliance Capital, had posted a net profit of Rs 31 crore in the July-September quarter of 2012-13.
The new business premium witnessed an increase of 58% to Rs 509 crore in the July-September quarter of 2013-14, from Rs 321 in the same period last fiscal.
"Despite challenging market conditions, we have registered a robust growth in the second quarter of this fiscal and expect to sustain this growth trend in new business premium in the third quarter as well," Reliance Life Insurance CEO Anup Rau told PTI.
"This growth has been supplemented with improvement in gross margins and this is again a movement that will be maintained in the current quarter," he added.
Reliance Life witnessed a growth of 7% in its total premium at Rs 1,007 crore for the quarter ended September 30, 2013. However, its renewals fell by 16% to Rs 578 crore in this period.
The total funds under management stood at Rs 17,525 crore as on September 30, 2013.
Rau said the company will continue to drive growth through increased sales manager and advisor productivity and improved quality of business, which is reflected by way of increased average ticket size.
Average ticket size per policy has increased substantially, he said, adding that Reliance Life has the average ticket size of nearly Rs 19,500 per policy compared to about Rs 12,000 in the past. "That has helped us increase our total new business premium," he added.
The company also achieved over 50% growth in agent productivity during the last quarter.
"Going forward, in the next couple of quarters, we believe that this quarter will also be fairly good for Reliance Life and they will show substantial growth as compared to the industry," Rau said, adding that the company is confident of registering a double-digit growth by the end of financial year 2013-14.
Reliance Life Insurance is amongst the leading private sector life insurance companies in terms of new business premium with a market share of 7% of the private sector life insurance industry.
