Star Health Eyeing Rs. 2,800 Crore Gross Written Premium This Fiscal

The largest stand-alone health insurance provider, Star Health and Allied Insurance, is eyeing gross written premium of Rs 2,800 crore by the end of this fiscal, a top company official has said.

The Chennai-based company, which saw a sales revenue of Rs 2,007 crore last fiscal, said it will continue to focus on retail customers and not group policies and is looking at covering around 90 lakh people this year.

"With only a fortnight left for the second quarter to end, we are very close to our first half target of a gross written premium (GWP) of Rs 1,100 crore as we have already sold policies worth Rs 970 crore, and want to take this to Rs 2,800 crore by March," Executive Director, Star Health & Allied Insurance, S. Prakash told PTI.

In the June quarter, its gross written premium stood at Rs 486 crore, he added. Star Health, which has around 48% market share is promoted by private equity players like Tata Capital, ICICI Venture, Sequoia Capital and the England-based APIS. The other standalone private health-cover providers are Apollo Munich, Cigna-TTK, Max Bupa and Religare.

All these five players had an GWP of Rs 1,791 crore as of August 31, 2016, as against with Rs 1,358 crore a year ago, a growth of 31%.

On claim settlement, he said it is settling around 26,000 claims worth around Rs 100 crore every month. In the June quarter alone, it had settled claims worth Rs 290 crore, while for the whole of last fiscal year, it had cleared claims worth Rs 960 crore.

Prakash also said the company's own staff makes all claim settlement and that it doesn't have any third-party administrators for this. Talking about sales plans for the current year, he said they had sold 68.23 lakh policies last year and the company has set a target of over 90 lakh policies this year.

On income from its investments, he said it was Rs 80 crore last year and this year the target is Rs 100 crore.

According to Prakash, 93% of the company's business fall under retail segment which is considered to be a healthy segment.