LIC books profit of ₹42,000 crore from stock market
Premium- On a full year basis, LIC reported a profit of ₹4,043.12 crore in FY22 against ₹2,900.57 crore in FY21
Life Insurance Corp. (LIC) of India booked profit of ₹42,000 crore from its investments in the stock market during FY22, compared to ₹36,000 crore in 2020-21, the state-owned insurance behemoth said on Tuesday.
LIC is the largest asset manager in India, with assets of close to ₹42 trillion under management, besides being the largest domestic investor in the local stock market. It invests approximately 25% of its assets in Indian equities, said Raj Kumar, managing director, LIC, while speaking at a media interaction a day after announcing its financials.
Kumar said the results for the fourth quarter of FY22 were not comparable with the year-ago period considering that the insurer started reporting quarterly profits from the September quarter of 2021. “The previous year’s profit pertains to full one year, but since the profit was declared in the last quarter only, it is appearing in the Q4 filing, but is for the full year. So strictly speaking, Q4 FY22 and Q4 FY21 are not comparable. It should be interpreted on a year-on-year basis with growth of 39.39%," said Kumar, adding that the quarterly numbers for June 2022 will also not be comparable with the corresponding quarter of last fiscal year.
On a full year basis, LIC reported a profit of ₹4,043.12 crore in FY22 against ₹2,900.57 crore in FY21. “From September quarter this year, comparable data will be available," said Kumar. LIC also did not disclose its latest Indian embedded valuation figure for the period ended 31 March. The management said it is conducting an exercise to calculate the Indian embedded valuation, value of new business, and the margin of new business, which is expected to be completed by 30 June.
Before its initial public offering, LIC said its embedded valuation was ₹5.39 trillion. “We are implementing a new IT solution for calculation of IEV and we need to cross check all the data to be absolutely sure the new system is perfect, although the two previous data (September and December) were perfectly matching our liabilities. We have 285 products. For every product we have to check the consistency of the data. So we are taking a little more time. Going onwards we will be doing it simultaneously with the completion of the financial statements," said Kumar.
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Kumar said LIC witness an increase in claims in FY22 due to dual impact of covid-19 and maturity payments arising out of a few products. “Four of our products matured and we had to pay the maturity claims. But the impact of four products getting closed will not be there for this financial year. We also believe that covid impact may not be as much as it was in the last fiscal year."