The purpose of this paper is to do an analysis of the ongoing competition between Life Insurance Council of India and the private life insurers and also the competition among the private companies themselves. This analysis has been done not only for the total life insurance market but also its sub sector which is the market for unit linked insurance products. To do this, secondary data was collected from public disclosures and annual reports of various life insurers and IRDA. The paper presents how the market share of LIC and the rest of the private players have changed since 1999, which private companies have emerged as the major players in the private sector, what is the composition of their portfolio in terms of the kind of policies they sell and their different strategies such as value versus volume based sales of insurance policies to grab the market share. As a result of the study, it was found that SBI Life Insurance Company, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and HDFC Standard Life Insurance have emerged as the biggest private sector life insurers in terms of the market share held by them with LIC holding 70% of the market. Also, it has come to light that SBI Life and HDFC Standard have been conservative players whereas ICICI Prudential is a more aggressive when it comes to the kind of policies they sell, i.e. traditional versus unit linked and value versus volume based selling. This paper is useful to life insurance companies to know where they stand in competition to others and also to understand their strategies regarding the types of policies sold by them, participating, non-participating or unit linked.
Life insurance, Competition analysis, Market share, Unit linked insurance products, Private players
