Life Insurance Corporation, which is bound for the nation’s largest share sale, is the strongest and the largest brand in the country with a valuation of $8.656 billion. This also makes it the third strongest insurance brand globally, said a Brand Finance report.

According to a Brand Finance report, London-based consultancy, the market value of Life Insurance Corporation will become Rs 43.40 lakh crore or $59.21 billion by 2022, and Rs 58.9 lakh crore or $78.63 billion by 2027. LIC’s brand value also climbed in the overall global brand rankings by 32 places to become the world’s 206th most valuable brand in 2021, from 238th slot in 2020.

According to this valuation, LIC is the largest and strongest brand in the country with a valuation of $8.655 billion in 2021, which grew by 6.8 per cent from $8.11 billion in 2020, when the value of top-100 insurers declined by six per cent globally.

Life Insurance Corporation ranks first in brand strength amongst the competitor set with a score of 84.1 and it ranks third in brand strength globally after Poste Italiane of Italy and Mapfre of Spain and is also the 10th most valued insurance brand globally, according to the report prepared in November 2021 but is yet to made public.

Interestingly, the state-owned insurance behemoth gained in brand value by 6.8 per cent last year, all other top 100 insurers saw their brand value decline by 6 per cent from $462.4 billion in 2020 to $433.0 billion in 2021. Of the top 10 as many as 5 are Chinese insurance companies, with by Ping An Insurance emerging as the world’s most valuable insurance brand, despite recording a 26 per cent drop in brand value, the report said. The US has two companies in the top 10, while France, Germany, and India have one each in the list. This has Life Insurance Corporation becoming the only domestic insurer to rank in the top 10 list strongest brands and top 10 most valuable insurance brands

Life Insurance Corporation has grown 151 per cent since 2014 clipping at 14 per cent on an annual basis. LIC percentage across all three pillars remains positive between 2020 and 2021 with large growth of 11 per cent in brand performance measures. After four years of steady decline, the brand strength of LIC shot up by nearly 14 points between 2018 and 2021.

On Tuesday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in her budget speech the initial public offer (IPO) of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is “expected shortly." The government is planning to raise up to Rs 1 lakh crore through the sale of shares in the LIC IPO, which could be India’s biggest IPO to date. The LIC IPO, which is expected to come out in early March, is expected to fill the fiscal deficit of this year.

Further, department of investment and public asset management (DIPAM) secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey has said that most of the preparatory work is almost over with finalisation of the embedded value (EV) of the Life Insurance Corporation, the insurer will file a draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) by next week for its mega LIC IPO