ICICI Lombard General Insurance Q1 net profit rises 35% to Rs 2.89 billion

ICICI Lombard General Insurance posted a net profit of Rs 2.89 billion in the first quarter of the current financial year, a 35 per cent increase from Rs 2.14 billion recorded at the end of the same quarter last year.

The firm has improved its combined ratio driven by lower loss and expenses ratio which has boosted its successful performance this quarter. 

Gross Direct Premium Income grew by 13.7 per cent to Rs 37.74 billion in Q1 of FY2019, as against Rs 33.2 billion in GDPI earned in the same quarter last year. 

Industry-wide growth in premium income among general insurance firms is pegged at 12.2 per cent for the first quarter of this current year. 

In terms of health insurance, the company underwrote Rs 7.5 billion (GDPI) worth of policies this quarter as compared to Rs 6 billion in the corresponding period of last year. The loss ratio has reduced by 50 basis points since the last quarter to 85.5 per cent.

Bhargava Dasgupta, managing director and chief executive officer at ICICI Lombard, said: “We are seeing a large amount of growth in volumes and we are focusing on segments which are not very lumpy,” which means that, “we are not writing a lot of the large ticket ‘group’ health portfolios.”