Globe Life Sees Agent Recruitment Improving

The company reported $164 million in net income for the quarter on $1.3 billion in revenue, compared with $179 million in net income on $1.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2021.

Overall life insurance sales increased 8%, to $139 million, and overall health insurance sales also increased 8%, to $43 million.

COVID-19

Frank Svoboda, Globe Life's chief financial officer, said that the company received $46 million in life insurance claims related to COVID-19 in the first quarter, and that the pandemic claim total was $17 million higher than expected.

Globe Life paid about $3 million in life claims per 10,000 U.S. pandemic-related deaths. That was toward the low end of the projected range.

The level of Globe Life life insurance claims per 10,000 deaths was relatively low because the average age of the people who died from COVID-19 in the quarter was relatively high, and the percentage of deaths occurring in the South fell.

Typical Globe Life life insurance insureds are working-age people in the South.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 155,000 Americans died from COVID-19 during the quarter, and Globe Life has been operating under the assumption that the country could hold the number of deaths to less than 85,000, Svoboda said.

Instead, he said, the U.S. death toll was the highest since the first quarter of 2021.

Life claims resulting from conditions other than COVID-19 were about $7 million higher than expected, Svoboda said.

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