Ahead of its initial public offering (IPO), HDFC Life’s CEO, Amitabh Chaudhry tells Subrata Panda and Anup Roy the reason why the insurance sector is seeing a surge in listings and how its protection business has been doing better than peers.
There were reports that Standard Life was pushing for the listing when the initial structure for the merger with Max Life was rejected by the regulator. Is the IPO driven by Standard Life’s drive to cash out some of its stake?
When we announced the merger in August 2016, a couple of months before that the board had decided that we would be the first company to go for an IPO. We gave the merger plans one full year to find the structure which can allow us to merge. When we decided to call off the merger, there was still no structure on the table which would have given us hope that in a relatively short period of time it would get us the approval of the authorities. So, the board decided that given the fact that we don’t have a structure on the table, maybe it makes sense to finish the IPO and let Max Financial solves its problems.
