Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

From the senior management, we have with us: Mr. Anand Roy, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer; Mr.

Amitabh Jain, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer; Mr. Himanshu Walia, Executive Director and Chief Marketing Officer; Mr.

Nilesh Kambli, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Aneesh Srivastava, Chief Investment Officer; and Mr.

Sombit Bhattacharya, Head Investor Relations. Before we begin the conference call, I would like to mention that some of the statements made during the course of today's call may be forward-looking in nature, including those related to the future financials and operating performance, benefits and synergies of the company's strategies, future opportunities, and growth of the market of the company's services.

Further, I would like to mention that some of the statements made in today's conference may involve risks and uncertainties. Thank you, and over to you, Mr.

Roy.

Thank you, and thank you so much, and good morning to everyone. Good morning and thank you for joining Star Health's earnings call for the fourth quarter and for the full financial year FY '25-26.

FY '26 was a year of strategic recalibration for us, focused towards strengthening our performance across the core operating levers, which is distribution, maintaining a strict underwriting discipline, claims management, and high focus on customer experience and operating efficiency. We had maintained that given the inherent characteristics of our business, the impact of all these measures would progressively manifest through the P&L.

Team Star Health has executed and continues to execute this strategic blueprint with consistency and conviction. As we report our results for Q4 and for the full fiscal FY '26, the green shoots of our operating turnaround in the previous quarters is now more pronounced in our underlying metrics, which I'll be taking you through in today's call.

I start by outlining the broader sectoral context and ecosystem trends which is shaping the business environment of our industry. India's health insurance has entered what we describe as a structurally advanced growth phase.

The confluence of policy support, consumer intent, and sustainable demand drivers is creating a very compelling backdrop towards a multi-decadal growth opportunity for the category. The GST exemption on retail health insurance, a landmark policy intervention by the Government of India, has already demonstrated significant impact.

Consumer intent is rising, actualized through category growth trends. We believe that retail health represents the most consequential value pool in the Indian insurance sector, with scale driven by deeper penetration amongst new-to-insurance customers, aligned with the national ambition of universal health coverage for all by 2047.

Reflecting this momentum, our new-to-insurance customers accounted for 94% of fresh additions in H2 FY '26, as compared to an already healthy 92% in H1 of FY '26. At industry level, retail health insurance premiums have grown by 30.2% YoY in H2 of FY '26, significantly outpacing the broader non-life industry growth, which came at 11.2% YoY during the same period.

For the full fiscal, non-life insurance premiums grew by 9.3% YoY, while retail health grew close to 20% YoY. Forward-looking reforms outlined by the regulator are supportive of long-term growth and sectoral development.

We welcome the IRDAI's formal mandate on implementation of Ind AS accounting standards from April 1, 2026. At Star Health, we have always believed it to be the most relevant framework and have aligned all our business and investment decisions towards these principles.

Our Ind AS financials have been reviewed by our joint statutory auditors for multiple quarters now, and we enter the Ind AS regime from a position of readiness. Against this backdrop, Star Health has remained focused on maintaining leadership in retail health insurance and compounding a durable value accretive franchise anchored on our four pillars, which is the risk-first approach, a consistent focus on RoE, a customer-centric execution, and a digital-first mindset.

Now let me take you through our quarterly performance highlights. Coming to our operating performance for the quarter, in line with our reporting convention in previous quarters, we will state our business numbers on end basis for quarter four and for the full financial year FY '26.

Going forward from next financial year, you would refer to a reported 1/N measures for both business and growth. Following are the highlights of our performance for Q4 FY '26.

Fresh retail growth on end basis for the quarter was 38% YoY. Fresh growth was driven by both value and volume as the number of retail health policies expanded by 11% YoY.

New-to-insurance mix was 94% on fresh premium basis, compared to 90% last year for the same quarter. Overall GWP increased 17% YoY on end basis to 6,259 crores for the quarter.

Our Ind AS underwriting profit for the quarter was 186 crores, an increase of 200% YoY over 62 crores in Q4 of FY '25. This was driven by an improvement in combined ratio by 2.7%, which was 98.4% in quarter four of FY '25 and came to 95.7% in quarter four of FY '26.

As in the previous quarters, our loss ratio improvement continued for the third successive quarters with a 4% improvement from 69.2 in quarter four of FY '25 to 65.2 in quarter four of FY '26. The retail loss ratio improved 3% YoY to 64.8% in this particular quarter four FY '26.

Our retail loss ratios have improved by 0.8%, 1%, and 3% YoY during Q2, Q3, and Q4 of FY '26, respectively, underscoring progressive improvement every quarter. The geopolitical tension-induced correction in the equity markets led to a 558 crores mark-to-market loss during the quarter.

As a result, we reported a loss of 42 crores for quarter four FY '26, compared to a profit of 270 crores during quarter four of FY '25. The headline statements for the full year FY '26, the full year numbers are as follows: The fresh retail business grew on end basis at 37% YoY, driven again both by value and volume, as the number of retail health policies grew 8% for the full year.

Our new-to-insurance mix, which we believe is focused on the quality of business, was 93% on fresh premium, as compared to 89% for the last fiscal. Overall GWP increased 16% YoY on end basis to 20,369 crores.

This is a very important milestone for us to cross 20,000 crores in GWP as we complete 20 years of establishment of Star Health in this calendar year. As against the full year loss of 165 crores during FY '25, underwriting profit turned positive at 206 crores for FY '26, a positive delta of 371 crores.

This was driven by improvement in combined ratio by 2.3% from 101.1 in FY '25 to 98.8 in FY '26. The improvement in combined ratio was further driven by improvement in both loss ratio and expense ratio.

The loss ratios improved by 2% to 68.7%. Further, the retail loss ratio improved by 1% to 68.2%.

Our Ind AS expense ratio also improved by 30 basis points to 30.1% for the full year. The improvement in expense ratio reflects disciplined cost management and operating leverage, notwithstanding an absolute impact of around 80 crores due to the factors such as GST and labor code.

On a full-year basis, the mark-to-market loss was 127 crores. Full-year PAT increased 16% YoY from 787 crores in last financial year to 911 crores in FY '26.

To smooth in the reported profitability against the short-term mark-to-market volatility, we are adopting a concept of normalized investment yield pegged at 8% on annualized basis. Going forward, we will consistently refer to this basis to depict an appropriate reflection of the underlying profitability, excluding the short-term fluctuations that may happen.

Under this normalized framework, our profit after tax increased 45% YoY in FY '26 to 1,222 crores, and RoE expanded from 10.1 in FY '25 to 13.1 in FY '26. Progressively improving operating performance in sequential quarters by disciplined execution and recalibrated strategies have resulted in turnaround of our underwriting results.

Coming to the business outcomes, we continue to build a very diversified, granular retail franchise focused on RoE-centric growth through preferred geographies and segments and channels which meet our profitability thresholds. Notwithstanding all of the underwriting discipline above, we have maintained a category leadership in retail health segment with market share at 31.3% in FY '26.

Our strategic choices aligned with the priorities outlined above have translated into tangible benefits as evidenced through the underwriting profitability improvements. Our proprietary distribution channels, which are the agency channel and the digital D2C, now contribute over 90% of the retail business and positions us to deepen the insurance penetration beyond the urban areas, with emphasis on new-to-insurance customers.

We will continue to focus on our preferred segments, which scale faster with significantly higher growth rate compared to the national average. On the portfolio management and recalibration strategies, we have undertaken disciplined recalibration of the portfolio anchored towards improvement of risk-adjusted outcomes.

Progressive improvements in loss ratios have been driven through multiple levers: analytics-led pricing, strengthened underwriting, portfolio optimization towards preferred segments, and further improvements in fraud, waste, and abuse management, and institutionalization of a wellness-based consumer ecosystem. Our home health care and telemedicine capabilities witnessed significant growth in utilization, enhancing our capabilities to manage fever and infection-related cases in a home-based setting, therefore improving the customer convenience as well.

Our consumer-focused metrics continue to demonstrate improvement trends. The retail claim settlement ratio increased by 3% to 92% for the full year.

Our renewal ratio on full-year basis increased by 2% to 99%. The company-level NPS improved by 8 points to 62 at March 31, 2026.

Our retail book demonstrates a best-in-class grievance ratio benchmarked with other standalone health insurers. On the digital side of things, the technology investments that Star Health is making are improving the productivity and service outcome, with digital embedded across the value chain through platform modernization, workflow automation, and straight-through processing, and also enhanced deployment of analytics and AI.

Acquisition and onboarding are now predominantly digitalized, with 95% of all fresh premiums are collected digitally. Our mobile application, the customer app, has over 14 million downloads, playing a pivotal role in driving customer engagement, acting as a primary interface across the policy life cycle.

Monthly active users of the app has scaled past the 1.5 million mark, with desirable levels of self-service adoption through claims intimations and renewals. Ongoing investment in experience design and self-service enablements will continue to enhance adoption, with integrated wellness and preventive care features enabling sustained non-transactional engagement as well.

Finally, in conclusion, to summarize, our strategic growth path remains centered on building a very granular retail franchise supported by our unmatched operating scale. We have 30%+ category market share.

We have 2.8 crores lives who are covered with us, 15,000+ hospital partners, 8 lakhs+ agents, moving towards a million agents in the next two years, 900+ offices, and 75+ partnerships. Heading into FY '27, our priorities remain unchanged, that is to deliver strategic objectives like customer-first approach, growth through proprietary channels, and focus on preferred segments.

We remain confident that disciplined execution at scale will translate into sustainable, risk-first balance of growth and RoE. Thank you for your continued trust in Star Health, and with that, we are now open to take your questions.

Thank you very much.

Hi, thanks a lot for the opportunity and very good morning to everyone. See, the loss ratio improvement has been a welcome change and a positive surprise for everybody.

My questions were on this bit and outlook here going ahead. See, the key drivers here has been one, the reduction in group health business and the improvement on the retail loss ratios.

However, the retail loss ratios are still above what the level that you operated at in '23-24, which was closer to 65%-66%. It's currently somewhere around 68%.

Wanted to understand what is the pathway of this 68% retail loss ratio going down to 65%-66%? Is that something that is possible, or has something structurally changed which does not make it possible?

If it's possible, what would be the pathway to that loss ratio improvement? That's the first bit.

Secondly, this year, the seasonal claims around vector-borne diseases was lower as compared to last year. As we go into '27 and if there is a recurrence of seasonal claims going up, how as a company Star Health is looking at mitigating that?

That would be the second question that I have. Thank you.

Thanks Supratim. Amitabh here.

We had a better than expected quarter four, as you would have seen in the numbers. Now, this business, as we all know, has cycles, and there could be cycles of frequency or severity going up in particular quarters, and we've seen that over the years.

Whatever a series of actions we have done over the last one and a half years, okay, I think we are well placed to see a continuous improvement in our loss ratios going forward. Specifically talking about dealing with the kind of cyclical events that happen, as stated by Anand in his address, we have been working on three specific areas on prevention and wellness, starting from telemedicine, home health care, and condition management programs.

These are three areas that we've been investing on. This year this has scaled up significantly.

We had seen overall 4x to 5x jump over the year. In fact, quarter four saw almost a 9x jump in the consumption of these services.

The idea is that we are able to provide a solution to our customers when they need in terms of fever, infectious diseases, gastro cases, which helps them manage things at home or through a telemedicine consultation. While we service them well, but we also keep the cost of servicing low.

That's the approach we've taken, and I think it's proceeding in the right direction.

Thanks a lot, Amitabh. Could you just quantify what proportion of your policyholders or people who are claiming are using this telemedicine service now versus last year?

We had more than 90,000 calls for the year for specifically calls that came for home health care, but eventually the numbers that utilized home health care were much lower, but the telemedicine calls were more than 90,000. Pure telemedicine calls were in excess of another 40,000.

That's the kind of usage we are already seeing.

Understood. That's very clear.

Thanks a lot for the opportunity.

Hi, good morning, everyone, and congratulations on a good set of numbers. Just a few questions from my side.

Firstly, Anand, you spoke about growth, right? While the industry has been seeing a very strong growth on the retail side, ours is still growth lower than the industry.

Obviously, the base kind of plays a role, but the gap that used to exist even say a few years back, that gap still exists. The other companies have also scaled up reasonably well over the last couple of years.

How do you see the growth panning out for us in the next couple of years given the tailwinds that we're seeing from the industry?

Prayesh, thanks for that question. See, I think over the last two, three quarters, we have been articulating that growth is important, but for us, quality of growth is more important, and that's what we are focusing on.

If you look at the quality of growth that we are building a franchise for which will be sustainable in the future, the new-to-insurance mix of the company has been the main focus. We are not so much focused on the portability side of business.

Within the geographies, also, we have taken some decisions on going slow in certain markets, as you are aware. I think we are not comparing exactly with what the others are doing, but we are more focused on what is our company's strategy and objectives, which is to have a sustainable high teens growth and a sustainable, hopefully, mid-teen to high-teen RoEs.

I think these are the two major focus areas, and that's what we are trying to drive.

Got that. Secondly was on loss ratio, right?

The fresh growth has picked up momentum in H2 of FY '26, and to certain extent, that is definitely a reflection in terms of improvement of loss ratio. As NEP unwinds out of this fresh growth, do you think that the loss ratio improvement can still hold up for another few quarters before the impact of this new book starts coming in from the loss ratio perspective also?

Absolutely. Already there's an increase in the earnings on the fresh retail business, and that's improved the portfolio mix.

The benefits of that as well as the repricing that we've been doing on the portfolio, both of them will play out in terms of a sustenance of this LR on an annual basis. There can be fluctuations in the quarter, but I think overall we should see an improvement.

Got that. Just a last bit on the commission side, in last couple of quarters, we've seen significant improvement on commission ratio.

I would assume that the fresh growth would obviously be at a higher commission, but some bit of benefit would have come in from the senior citizens commission adjustment that you've done. Could you still explain more as to is there any other lever that is helping the commission ratios or it's just the senior citizen part?

To that, what is the contribution of senior citizens, say, in FY '26 versus FY '25?

Senior citizen contributes around 20% of portfolio, Prayesh. Yes, along with senior citizen, we have been taking various measures to control the outgo in terms of the procurement cost or sourcing cost.

Some bit of impact is there because the fresh growth has been higher, but senior citizen is one factor and the other initiatives that we have taken is ensuring that the productivity of our sales managers has also improved a lot. All these initiatives are helping us to improve the commission ratio.

The mix was same in FY '25 also? 20% in FY '25 and FY '26 both it's 20%?

It's largely in that range, but this initiative on reduction in senior citizen commission was effective April FY '25, it's effective only for '25-26.

Got that. Thanks, that's helpful.

Hi, sir. Thank you for the opportunity, and congrats on a good set of numbers.

Three questions from my side, sir. First, wanted to understand what is the status in terms of price hikes, if you could give some color in terms of what proportions in what products you are doing, how much would be the proportion in terms of GWP and what is the quantum of price hike in an average?

I think that will be very helpful. Given that, sir, you highlighted that in the opening remarks that there is both value and volumes led growth in fresh, I just wanted to understand the same from the renewal side also.

How would have things transpired in terms of value and volume? How should we think about the growth numbers?

If you could also highlight the proportion of fresh in your mix. Is it about a quarter of your overall GDPI?

Would that be the right assessment? That's one.

Second is, sir, wanted to understand the retention ratio seems to have come off a little bit from last quarter, what is playing out there if you could highlight? Thirdly, in terms of the NEP growth, so, sir, we are more or less now for multiple quarters growing at a fairly steady rate.

Just wanted to understand that why is NEP growth still lagging the GWP growth? How should we think about it, and given that the momentum that is there in fresh business, etc., when do we expect the NEP growth to pick up and come to 15% kind of a range?

That would be my question, sir.

Swarnabha, let me take some of those questions and I'll request my colleagues to pitch in wherever needed. The price hike which you mentioned is our strategy has been that we will take an annual price increase in all our products, and we will continue to follow that strategy.

Of course, within that, we will see how do we optimize so that customers are given benefits based on their own behavior in terms of wellness and health conditions and so on and so forth. That we will continue to do.

On the renewal side, you have asked about value and volume. I'm happy to tell you that Star Health, with the kind of scale that we operate, we have the best persistency in the industry, both on volume and as well as on value.

I think on volume basis, we have seen almost close to 86%-87% retention in terms of volume, and we believe that there is scope to improve further, but we are still the best in the industry. On the NEP growth, see, I think broadly because of the long-term policy sales, which is now becoming the order of the day, most of the consumers are preferring to go for long-term policies, which is, I believe, good for all the stakeholders, both from consumer point of view, from the distributors, as well as from the insurance company's point of view.

I think that's why the NEP growth will have a lag effect, but it will catch up in the upcoming quarters.

Right, sir. Just a follow-up on this that given that the fresh growth as you mentioned is around 35%-37% odd and the volume growth is, I think, 8%-9%, which you had mentioned in your opening remarks.

Would it be fair to assume that going forward also, earlier we used to highlight about a 50% volume and 50% value-led growth, because now we take consistent price hike and maybe this will be the industry phenomenon as well, would it be slightly lopsided towards value growth? Would that be a fair expectation going ahead?

In the end-basis reporting, yes, but once we move to 1/N-basis reporting, I think it'll kind of normalize to some extent. Yes, this distortion is coming because of the long-term policy sales, which is now the preferred segment for the customers.

Understood, sir. Is this also related to the long-term sales, if you could maybe give some color on that?

See, Swarnabha, Q3 was a very unique phenomenon. The GST cut happened in September.

What happened is a lot of people waited for the month of September and they renewed their policies in Q3. Q4 is traditionally a very big quarter, and we see some spillover coming to Q1.

On a yearly basis, in fact, we have improved the volume-based retention by 1%-1.5%, but there was slight anomaly in Q3 and Q4 because of this GST cut, which happened in Q2. September was the announcement, and people waited in September and did their renewals within the grace period in Q3.

Understood. Very helpful.

Thank you so much, and all the best.

Hi. Good morning, sir.

A few questions from my side. If you were to look at your YoY growth in the volume of claims or the value of claims that you have paid, just wanted to understand if you were to break it between inflation for similar treatments, again, to the extent possible, versus let's say claims frequency or incidence.

How would that trajectory have fared in FY '26 versus let's say the past few years or historically witnessed averages? The second question is, now that you have started seeing improvement in your retail claims ratio on a YoY basis, and the quantum of YoY change seems to be improving in terms of the claims ratio going down, some of it is obviously new business, but if you can give some color on how the back book is trending, and especially some of your vintage products which historically had witnessed some pressure, that will be really great.

Any qualitative feedback on that. The third question is on the agency front.

You mentioned that you want to touch almost 10 lakh agents over the next two years. Now once you reach a certain size and scale in terms of the proprietary channel and given the competitive pressure, what sort of strategies around ring-fencing, activation, improving productivity or curtailing or controlling commission payouts from those channels?

What are those strategies? I have one question on the regulatory front, but maybe I can ask it after this three.

On the first question, for the whole year, the frequency and severity as a whole, we've been able to sort of manage it in the high single digits, which is the trend that has been there for us for some time now. If you were to talk about the quality of the renewal book, that is seeing a consistent improvement in LR given our pricing strategy that we've been following over the last one and a half years.

On both those, things are looking better. We believe that this as a strategy, we will continue as far as the pricing of the book is concerned.

We're expecting to reprice almost 80% of the book between what we started from Q4 going up to Q1 this year, and that will show up in the earnings going forward.

On the agency side, we are confident of getting to 1 million in the next two years, and we maintain this that we will be adding 1 lakh agents every year for the next many years. If you look at our agent productivity, even for this year, it has improved by about 37% on fresh and overall 18% on total business.

This is coming on the back of the upskilling of the agents that we do on a regular basis and our L&D transformation, which is led by the technology solutions that we're providing to our agents. We continue to believe that this will continue to improve.

As far as the ring-fencing of the agents is concerned, we have best-in-class offerings for our agents, which we believe will continue to maintain stickiness of our agents.

Got it. One last question from my side on the regulatory front.

Till date, we are under a company-level expense of management, and while there has been multiple discussions on line of business-wise EoM, just wanted to understand that when you talk to the regulator, are they cognizant of the fact that there is a natural arbitrage between SAHIs and multi-liners in terms of expense of management on the retail health business, and if there is any consideration on that front?

Dipanjan, what was the question arbitrage? Please explain.

For example, you guys can operate at maximum of 35% and your book is almost entirely retail health, right? Whereas there is a possibility of cross-subsidization at the multi-line channels in terms of them able to operate at a higher EoM specifically for the retail health line.

Okay. No, I think, broadly, we await IRDAI's guidance on the EoM.

There has been some data that the regulator has asked, which all of us have supplied. You will appreciate that we have been a very disciplined company in terms of EoM.

We are probably the only company in this space operating within the current guidelines. We continue to invest a lot to improve our expenses operating ratios better.

We will await that. Don't want to give any comment now, but when it comes, I'm sure it'll be fair to all the players.

More

importantly, fair to the consumers. Yeah.

Sure. Maybe just one small follow-up.

You mentioned your claim severity is around high single digit. Hypothetically speaking, if your price hikes are let's say a percentage or a few percentage points higher than your claim severity, is that going to be a strategy to kind of bring this claims ratio down from let's say whatever 68%-69% to let's say somewhere around 65%?

Is that something you guys would be focusing on? That's all from my side.

Obviously, claims severity is a function of higher quality of treatments and the kind of disease profiles we're seeing nowadays. Pricing of insurance products will always be a factor of that.

To maintain our margins, we may have to take a slightly higher than that. Then there are efforts continuously being done to manage severity better in terms of discussing with our hospitals, having more preferred partners.

Obviously, we have a target combined ratio under which we want to operate, and to that extent, we will keep taking our strategies aligned.

Thanks Anand and the team, and all the best. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity.

Sorry Anand and Amitabh, it's the same question probably in a different way. See, the loss ratio improvement, honestly, was a positive surprise, very positive surprise.

If you really want to attribute a major reason, is it the large part of the improvement happened in the renewal book, and naturally the new contribution would have played a role, but the bigger delta came from the renewal book because of your that cohort-based or pricing strategy which you adopted last maybe five quarters back. That is getting reflected in the numbers, and therefore if that strategy was useful, and if you try to implement to the entire book, is it fair to say that the renewal book delta will be the biggest change to bring the loss ratio improvement going ahead?

That was my question. Basically, I just wanted to understand the breakup or waterfall of the loss ratio improvement, whether it is new, renewal, or severity, or hospital management.

Just if you can give a bit color there, it will be useful.

Sanketh, I think you have answered the question yourself. It's a sum of all parts, right?

It's not one can lay a finger on any one particular item. It's everything that you mentioned.

It's a improvement in the renewal book, the pricing strategy, the quality of sourcing of new business, the selection of geographies and profile of customers, and of course, over and above that, most importantly, having very, very strong FWA, fraud, waste, and abuse management initiatives. It's a combination of everything.

I think as we operate at a scale which probably others are not able to do, and that's why the kind of data and the kind of analytics we bring to the table to manage this is a little better than what maybe others can provide. It's a combination of everything.

Amitabh, you want to add?

As far as if you want to specifically ask, the improvement has been across the renewal book and the fresh book, it's not simply about one aspect of the business. Two, the overall impact specifically in quarter four has been the improvement in frequency that we have seen over the last year.

That across the entire book. It doesn't play out only for one thing.

All of this has been enabled because of the continuous efforts we've been taking on the telemedicine and home health care front along with all other prevention measures. This is something that is playing across the book.

Understood, Amitabh. Amitabh, just on this frequency part you said, is it that it was in general lower than usually it is, or this frequency coming down is more structural because of the telemedicine and all the measures what you just told is playing out?

It is lower than what we expected, and the fact that both our interventions have played, it's a mix of both.

Which means that incrementally the loss ratio maybe if not 68%, 66%-67% kind of a number can be achievable given the intervention measures what you are taking from next year point of view? See,

the point is that this business, we need to discuss in terms of a longer period and we can't just focus on a particular quarter, right? Whatever changes and series of interventions we've done are for the improvement of the book in the longer term.

There can be cyclical ups and downs in a quarter or here and there, but fundamentally what we are trying to improve is the quality of the book, the quality of sourcing, the way we are managing our claims, the way we're dealing with fraud, waste, and abuse, and disproportionately focus on managing the claims that can be managed at home or through telemedicine, and invest on wellness as a big part of our strategy. Understood.

One one

one small data-keeping question, maybe two basically. One, if you can give your 4,567 crores of fresh premium break up into long-term and annual plans, and how it was compared to last year.

Maybe if you can give that number both on NOP and premium basis will be useful. Lastly, in the fresh premium, you said, Anand, that or even it's there in the presentation, that 93% of the business is fresh to insurance customer, which means indirectly 7% of the customer are porting.

That is on NOP, but if you can give a bit of color on premium too, that 7% if it is porting-led, in the fresh premium, how much is on that premium, 4,567 crores?

No, Sanketh, the number is on GWP, not on NOP, on the new-to-insurance. It's on fresh premium,

okay?

I'm not even saying that we will not do portability. What I'm saying is that we will be calibrated in making it a risk-first approach, and where we feel that there is opportunity, we will go for that.

As far as the breakups of long-term and all that is concerned, we will give it to you separately.

Yeah. Anand.

Thanks for the answers.

Hi. Thanks for the opportunity.

Congratulations on great set of numbers. A couple of questions.

The first one more around that a lot of kind of the actions you have taken on multiple parts of your business, including the repricing of portfolio and all. Now, of course, the BAU-based repricing or price increase you will continue, but do you see the way that medical inflation and your claims experience are going forward, any sort of a major repricing need is at least not there in FY '27 and it will be normal, whatsoever single digit or whatsoever possible typical the price increase?

Is that current prices sustainable with the kind of a claim inflation to settle you in your desired combined ratio zone? The second on the regulatory side, of course, I guess you briefly touched upon the expected EoM/commission regulation to be out in near future.

On this Bima Sugam that finally seems to be kind of making some progress, what's your evaluation? Is it going to be kind of augmenting your sourcing or it is more going to be the renewal and maintenance?

On that front, is a regulator looking that the product, whether it's a new or renewal, to be priced differently on this platform, because this platform is being projected as a direct to customer and for customer only. Is there some sort of a rebate or discount that the insurer has to offer to the customer on this platform if the customer is buying new or renewing the policy?

Thanks.

Avinash, first of all, thank you for the good wishes. See, over the last five to six quarters, we have been taking this pricing corrections across all our products.

As you rightly put it, we'll be taking this in the future as well. We do not foresee any particular change in the strategy or any increase that is beyond normal.

We do not see that. We continue to maintain the current strategy, and we believe that that should be more than sufficient for us to maintain the target combined ratio that we have.

That is one. As far as the Bima Sugam platform is concerned, I think the project is more focused on giving a platform to the consumers for affordable insurance plans.

Obviously, it will not be zero cost, but there may be lower cost. At the same time, it is also a service-oriented platform for both having all insurance policies under one roof in terms of life insurance, health insurance, and all general insurance products, so that the consumer can have one platform to do all the services themselves.

I think this is a good initiative. We are totally supportive of that.

We're also a shareholder of the platform, we hope that it is successful, and we'll keep you updated as we get more information.

A quick one, now looking back this EoM regulation that had a kind of a March '26 as a deadline, now what is the regulator's view now in terms of because a number of players will be non-compliant. Now what are you hearing?

Of course, you are in the compliant bucket, but across the board, because eventually when this new EoM regulation was launched on 1st April '23, there was a deadline and there was a kind of a management that companies had to give a glide path how they're exiting March '26 with those kind of a limits, the 30% or 35% limit depending upon the class. Now what is the regulator's view now for the non-compliant companies?

Because this kind of a will set that, okay, how in future the companies will take regulatory words. If even with a 3-year deadline if there is no sort of a action or nudge from regulator for the non-compliant, then it's very difficult to believe that in future regulations will be taken that seriously.

Sir, this is a very difficult question for me to answer. I think I'll give it a pass.

No worries. Thanks.

Yes, thanks for the opportunity. Two questions.

Firstly, sir, you've talked about continuing with the price hikes in your portfolio. Given the sensitivity around GST cut being passed on to the consumers and government indicating they are keeping a close eye on that, how do you think you'll be able to manage price hike in the near term, which is not overlapping or compensating for some of the GST loss?

At optics, I understand, but do you believe this will be easier to do than how it looks?

See, Rishi, the pricing strategies are all done beforehand in the sense that pricing strategies are based on product performance. It has nothing to do with GST.

GST benefits was fully passed on to the consumers. The pricing strategies of the company is based on the performance of the product in terms of the loss ratios.

On that basis only, we are taking the price increases. I believe that it should be fair to all the stakeholders.

It is based on fully defined actuarial principles, and I don't think that there should be any resistance there. Yeah.

Fair enough, sir. Thank you.

The other question is on it's been now 7, 8 months of GST exemption-related tailwinds that we have seen. In your portfolio where customers are returning for renewals out of the ₹118 say of cash outflow that they used to do for a ₹100 premium, can you give some sense of how much have we been able to retain in the form of maybe a higher sum assured and as a result higher premium or attach more riders so that that ₹118 inflow actually doesn't go down completely to ₹100?

Just want to understand how much incremental demand we have received from the returning customers.

Good question, Rishi. If you look at our renewal retention numbers for the current financial year, there's a 300 bps improvement in terms of GWP, right?

That clearly reflects that the customers are now opting for higher sum insured and they are also willing to opt for riders which are beneficial for them. In terms of NOP numbers, there's a 100 bps improvement.

Goes to show that there is significant improvement in the back book.

How does this look for our distributors?

Distributors are pretty much happy because the growth has been upwards of 50% ever since GST has been announced, right? Their income levels have gone up.

Understood. Thank you.

All the best.

Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations for a good set of numbers. First question is on NEP mix.

If you can share what is the share of new and renewal for FY '26 and FY '25 on NEP basis?

See, NEP basis, as you mentioned, a good proportion of the long-term business is coming in. It's in the range of 2% difference.

It has been 80/20 and it's changed by 100 to 150 basis points on premium basis.

Next year also this ratio should further increase because as these long-term policies business will get accrued in NEP? Is that the right understanding?

Yes, it will continue to improve gradually.

Secondly, we have seen a good improvement in group health claims ratio. I think we have been defocusing on that segment for last one year.

What is the strategy on that segment going forward? Do we expect growth to come back in that segment?

See, we've taken a very recalibrated strategy right at the beginning of FY '26 and that has played out really well, which reflects in our loss ratio, right? We've been focusing on our SME segment, which for the current financial year has contributed to 78% of our overall business, which was 58% in FY '25.

We continue to maintain this strategy and we are absolutely clear that we will go behind businesses which are profitable in nature, and SME is one of those businesses. We have taken growth rate targets in line with the overall objective of the organization.

Sure. Third question is on our growth in retail segment.

If you look at Q4, the growth in retail is around 19% versus industry growth is close to 29%. There is a decent gap in our retail growth and industry growth.

How are we thinking about this gap let's say from a medium-term perspective? Because the industry has got benefited from GST cut and that benefit probably will come into base in H2.

When industry is growing at steady state of 17%, 18%, how should we see this gap between our growth and industry growth panning out?"

See, at Star, we are completely aligned on profitable growth, right? Our market share has sustained at 31% for the full year.

Internally, we track our business on end basis and growth remains pretty steady on that front with upwards of 39% for FY '26. More importantly, we are focused on profitable geographies and profitable cohorts of consumers, right?

Which is why if you look at our mix of business on the new-to-industry is now about 94%, 95% and portability has come down further. As maintained in the previous calls also, we will continue to chase businesses which are profitable in nature, right?

Growth, we are not desperate to grow our market share at the cost of profits.

Sure. Last question is if you can share the quantum of deferred revenue on long-term policy as of March '26?

Quantum of deferred revenue is the premium received in advance.

Yes, premium received in advance. Yes.

We can give it to you offline. It's part of the balance sheet, it's shared.

Sure. Thank you.

That's it from my side. Thank you.

Thank you, Nidhesh.

Yeah. Hi, thanks a lot for the opportunity for this follow-up.

Just two questions. One, you have transitioned to this Medi Assist platform.

It has been now nearly one year. Just wanted to understand how is that transition playing out, what are the savings that you're getting, and how should we think about that playing out over the next couple of years?

That's one. Secondly, on this IRDAI initiative regarding public insurance registry, wanted to understand how do you see that impact loss ratios, particularly on the fraud and waste side, if you could give some color there?

That would be helpful. Thank you.

On the platform shift on the claims processing, that is now nearly complete. We're just entering the final phase of our last set of products that will be shifted onto that platform.

By this quarter-end, I think we should be fully through. We're clearly seeing efficiencies coming across for which we had sought for the platform, and that's playing out.

More importantly, it's not simply a matter of efficiency, but also the effectiveness of managing our claims better and giving our customers a better experience. On both those fronts, we are doing fine.

On the PIR side, Supratim, this is a very good initiative, we believe so. It will help the industry to have more disciplined underwriting data.

We await further insights on this. While we are closely engaged with the regulator in terms of building this model, our CTO is part of the working group as far as this particular model is concerned.

We'll keep you updated as we get to know more.

Thank you.

Hi, sir. Congratulations.

From my side, I just wanted to know, since historically we've had ups and downs in terms of loss ratios and often external environment has also played a part in it, how do you assess the current external environment in terms of the health care lifestyle changes as well as some of the seasonal stuff? Second, is there a thought process to smooth in out some of these movements over time?

Because often, the profit and loss and loss ratios kind of get impacted by changes in external environment while we are trying to improve the internal processes and policies. External environment has historically often played a part in how vagaries of business have panned out.

Is there a thought process to smooth in out the impact of external impacts?

Mohit, so that's a good question and I think you'll be happy to know that there is a lot of engagement now happening at various stakeholder levels on the external environment side to manage the piece that you're talking about, whether it is GI Council creating a common empanelment of hospitals, whether it is the IRDAI and CII working together to bring the payers and providers together on a single platform. Five working groups have been created, and we believe that all these initiatives will over time reduce the friction and also, at the same time, reduce the challenges that we used to face earlier.

I think this is something that we can do. On the internal side, as you have seen that over the last four, five quarters, we have set a process in place, and for the last three quarters consistently we have been demonstrating that the loss ratios have been improving.

I think the model is working fine, and we will continue to invest in the same model. Beyond that, I think company will focus on sustainable growth with a sustainable RoE targets that we have set for ourselves.

If that answers your question. Thank you.

Got it. Thank you and wish you all the best.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. It has been one of the turnaround year for Star Health in terms of higher retail health growth and improvement in the combined ratio, driven by an improvement in loss ratio.

The normalized PAT with 8% investment yield has seen a robust growth to 1,222 crores, and we continue to build on that in the coming future. We'll continue to execute our strategy with more conviction and confidence, and thanks for your continued support.

Thank you very much.