Dubai: Oriental Insurance Company, India's third-largest insurer, will expand its footprint in the Middle East with an office in Qatar and new products targeted at Indian expatriates, a senior executive said.
The company set up operations in Dubai in 1960 and also operates from Kuwait.
"Our Kuwait operation is already as large as the one in Dubai, and we are awaiting pre-regulatory approvals for Qatar," Dr R.K. Kaul, the company's chairman and managing director, told Gulf News.
"We also have an online portal from where people may buy policies for personalised services, such as medicare, household and accidental. We are also looking at another medicare product that will allow expatriates to have treatment only in India. But that's still under consideration."
Oriental offers expatriates the Pravasi Bhartiya Yojana policy, which covers working expatriates in the event of personal injury and death.
"However, in the UAE, they would need to take the normal personalised policies," Kaul said.
Oriental Insurance cele-brated 50 years of operations in the UAE last week. Kaul, who was in Dubai to commemorate this occasion with the local chief agents, ARMAB, detailed the company's sustained growth in India and the Middle East.
"We hold a dominant place in the Indian market with a recorded Rs48 billion premium and have grown 20 per cent in the last year," he said.
The company's operations were established in Dubai in 1960 by Sobhraj G. Mulani to facilitate his fellow Indian businessmen to get access to insurance. Dubai was then part of what was known as Trucial States and the company started with a very small premium.
Ten years ago, Oriental crossed Dh10 million in profits and today has reached the Dh40 million mark.
"That's a huge growth in the past 11 years," Kaul said. "In this region we may still not be a dominant player but have solid operations that have shown record profits [in] all years except one."
In 2000, the insurance market in India was opened up to private companies, taking away the monopoly of the four public sector undertakings Oriental Insurance, United Insurance, New India Insurance and National Insurance.
"Yes, the private insurance sector did show some strong initial growth because they started from a very small base," Kaul said. "They may have kept some things transparent, some not so transparent, which could have given them an advantage. "But now, when insurance rates have been de-tariffed, we have all been working on a level playing field. In fact, we have been giving the private companies very good competition."
Humble beginnings
The Oriental Insurance Company was incorporated in Mumbai on September 12, 1947, less than a month after India gained independence from British rule. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oriental Government Security Life Assurance Company and was formed to carry out the general insurance business. The company was a subsidiary of Life Insurance Corporation of India from 1956 to 1973. In 2003, all shares of the company held by the General Insurance Corporation of India were transferred to the federal government. From less than Rs100,000 at inception, its gross premium income went up to Rs580 million in 1973 and Rs40.77 billion in 2009.
