LIC Surplus Jumps Over 10% In FY18

Life Insurance Corporation of India has seen its annual surplus expand by 10.1 percent to Rs 48,444.82 crore for fiscal 2018, enabling it to pay Rs 2,430.19 crore as the government share.

LIC generated a total valuation surplus of Rs 48,444.82 crore for fiscal 2018, which is 10.1 percent higher than what it had generated in the previous fiscal, the Corporation said in a statement Friday. In fiscal 2017, the Corporation had paid Rs 2,206.70 crore to the government, which was had 15.8 percent over fiscal 2016.

In fiscal 2017, it booked a surplus of Rs 44,134 crore, up 16.14 percent, when it had also paid a Rs 500-crore one-time bonus to the government. The Corporation now manages assets worth over Rs 28.45 lakh crore and had an annual income of Rs 4.92 lakh crore.

In life insurance parlance, valuation surplus is akin to profit for companies and as per the LIC Act, it has to distribute 95 percent of the surplus to the policyholders and the balance to government, its shareholder. Corporation chairman VK Sharma presented a cheque for the surplus amount to finance minister Arun Jaitley in the national capital Friday, said the statement.

The 62-year-old corporation said its market share by number of policies stood at 75.67 percent for the year under review. Of the total annual income of Rs 5.23 lakh crore, the first-year premium income stood at Rs 1.34 lakh crore, which is the highest in its history.

The Corporation has settled as much as 2.66 crore claims worth Rs 1.11 lakh crore during the year gone-by, the statement added.