Closing the year 2017, Bao Viet Life continued to record steady growth and maintained its leading position on the life insurance market of Vietnam with a new premium market share reaching about 21 percent, while Prudential still ranked the second with new premium market share of over 18 percent.
It is known that the aim of Bao Viet Life in 2018 is to continue maintaining the first position in revenue and ensuring stable and sustainable growth (over 20 percent) through optimising service quality; enhancing information technology applications; and expanding convenience charging methods, premium collection and management tools, electronic invoices, online insurance claims, and chatbot, etc.
Prudential Vietnam in recent time has made many changes after the fluctuations in human resources as well as media crisis. However, since it has missed the opportunities of the market spin, it needs to make a lot of efforts in order to regain the number one position, as well as not letting other insurers such as Dai-ichi Life Vietnam surpass.
According to preliminary statistics, the new premium market share in 2017 of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam reached more than 16 percent, and the company is closing following Prudential. Observers said that in the group of insurers that hold large market shares, Dai-ichi Life Vietnam will continue to be the most prominent name, because the company’s positive growth momentum in 2017 is a good stepping stone for the company to spurt in 2018 and the next years.
In addition, Dai-ichi Life Vietnam’s network has now covered across 63 provinces and cities of Vietnam, in addition to other key distribution channels such as bancassurance or selling insurance via postal system. In fact, over 90 percent of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam premium revenue has come from traditional channel agent. In 2018, the company will promote other signed channels.
“With the acceleration of cooperation with large banks, we expect that non-traditional channels (banks and post offices) will contribute 10 percent to the total premium revenue. This number is planned to be increased by 20 percent in the next five years, and reach 25-30 percent in the next seven to 10 years”, said representative of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam.
In the group of insurers holding smaller market shares, the new member FWD made its mark in the past year. Specifically, just one year after its establishment in 2016, FWD’s reached the top 10 out of 18 life insurers, a record in growth of a newly founded insurance company in Vietnam. Closing the year 2017, FWD’s brand recognition index is 27 percent, ranking the sixth on the market.
Generali Vietnam is also a notable name with rapid changes in services as well as products to adapt to the development of the market. By the end of 2017, the generali Vietnam was in the top insurers having new premium revenue of over one billion dong with market share of new exploitation reaching about 5 percent.
Meanwhile, joint ventures and insurance companies mainly selling products via bancassurance channel such as Aviva or BIDV Metlife also recorded significant growth. These two companies are having many new strategies in 2018.
In 2018, insurance sector targets 129.246 trillion dong revenue and 22.38 percent growth rate. With the huge potential of Vietnam’s insurance market, in addition to the stable macroeconomic factors and the completing insurance management policies, most insurance companies believed that these targets are feasible. For life insurance companies, the new premium revenue in 2018 is even forecasted to growth by about 30 percent.
“The market can achieve this growth rate as people’s livelihoods are increasing and the middle-class population are also enlarging, leading to the rise of insurance demand”, said a CEU of an insurance company. However, the CEO also added that 30 percent growth rate is fairly hot, and the market just needs to maintain a stable annual growth of 20-25 percent.
Assessing the growth and market development, experts in the industry said that the growth of each company will help the market grow faster, but more importantly, the development must be seen across the firms in terms of both speed and quality of growth.
