Great Eastern's net profit slips 11% to $195.2m in Q4

Blame the lacklustre insurance business.

Life insurance group Great Eastern Holdings reported an 11% lower net profit in 4Q16 to $195.2m.

This is mainly due to the slump in the operating profit of its insurance business, which dropped by one-third or 33%. This is attributed to new business strain from higher sales growth and medical claims in the Singapore operations.

Great Eastern CEO Khor Hock Seng said the group will continue to strengthen its business model and prudently manage costs and improve operational efficiencies.

“We continued to deliver a strong set of new business results in 2016, with the Group’s Total Weighted New Sales surpassing $1 billion with a growth of 11% and New Business Embedded Value growing by 22%," Khor noted.

He added, "Central to this is the strength and depth of our multi-channel distribution capabilities, driven by our high quality agency and synergistic bancassurance partnership with OCBC Bank. The results are also testament to the disciplined execution of our strategy to further grow our business in our core markets of Singapore and Malaysia, while we continue to build our operations in Indonesia and our Takaful business in Malaysia."

Moving ahead, Khor said the group will continue to look for innovative ways to enhance the group's service level and enrich customer experience through digitalisation and analytics.