BALIC's strategic transformation could establish it as a premium player with sustainable competitive advantages, potentially leading to significant re-rating once growth resumes.

“During the second half of the year, BALIC launched 'BALIC 2.0' with a focus on sustainable and profitable growth while restructuring products to comply with revised product regulations. Simultaneously, it restructured most of the other products as well, focused on balanced product mix and focus on cost for operating leverage.”

— Tarun Chugh, MD & CEO, BALIC

The strategic shift involved changing 100% of their products (vs. industry's 50%), deliberately taking a growth pause during regulatory transitions to emerge stronger with superior margins.

“We've been saying this as a guidance in our last two calls that we will be making a significant strategic shift, which we did make and we have ensured that our VNB margin is now moving up in the direction... While 50% of the products changed in the market, we changed 100% of our products. This was to result and I think it was a call which on hindsight has gone correct.”

— Tarun Chugh, MD & CEO, BALIC

Market appears to be misreading BAGIC's true performance due to accounting changes - underlying growth is actually 8% vs. reported -13% decline.

“If we exclude the impact of volatility in the tender-driven crop and government health business and the impact of '1/n' regulations, the growth for BAGIC is about 8% for the quarter as compared to the reported degrowth of 13%. Similarly on a full year basis, the growth excluding crop and government health and the impact of '1/n' regulation for BAGIC is 12%, which is about 3% higher than the industry growth of 9%.”

— Ramandeep Singh Sahni, CFO

The Allianz buyout removes JV restrictions, enabling new business lines (pension, international, GIFT City operations) and strategic flexibility previously unavailable.

“We now have 100%, a lot more leeway to look at strategic opportunities which may involve dilution, maybe we can look at other business initiatives including for example in the GIFT City, we can look at the pension business, potentially, we can look at international foray as well because this is a sign of a very large amount being put up as domestic capital.”

— S. Sreenivasan, President

“Early success in converting domestic healthcare processing scale (2.8 million claims processed) into international capabilities with "significantly higher" profitability margins than domestic business.”

“While India is 16% of global population, India is less than 1% of healthcare spend of the world... we are very optimistic given that we process a lot of volumes in India, our competency set in technology in AI would create a proposition for international market... international is significantly higher [on profitability], but the market size there is tremendous.”

— Devang Mody, MD & CEO, Bajaj Finserv Health

Strong balance sheet (BAGIC: 325% solvency, BALIC: 359% solvency) combined with patient capital approach creates unique competitive positioning.

“We are not short-term players, and we are a more than 100-year-old group and therefore we have the patience and resilience to be able to play it with the aid of the surplus capital and the power of the brand that we have.”

— S. Sreenivasan, President