A strong growth in health insurance premiums buoyed
Ping An Insurance to an annualised 6.5% rise in net profit for the first half of 2017.
The insurance giant reported net profit for the period at 43.43 billion yuan (USD$6.51 billion), almost 3 billion yuan more than the same period of 2016. Total premium income stood at 341.39 billion yuan (USD$51 billion) in the first half of the year.
The firm’s core finance businesses had an overall individual customer base of 143 million yuan (USD$21 million), up 9.3% from the start of the year. Over a quarter (26.1%) of Ping An’s individual customers held multiple contracts with different subsidiaries.
Premium income of the property and casualty arm climbed 23.5%, and its market share rose 1.5 percentage points year on year. Meanwhile, Ping An Life realized a 34.8% year on year rise in net profit to 22.6 billion yuan (about US$3.39 billion) and a 38.7% year on year rise in residual margin release to 24 billion yuan (about $US3.6 billion).
“Our long-term value creation strategy and protection-oriented product philosophy enabled us to seize targeted growth opportunities and boost our insurance business revenue and embedded value,” said Ping An chairman and CEO Ma Mingzhe. “As insurance products become increasingly consumption oriented, demand for insurance is growing due to preferential industry policies, an ageing population, and rising personal income.”
Looking ahead, the CEO said Ping An seeks to transform from a capital-driven firm to a technology-driven one “in the near future.”
“Ping An has over 500 big data scientists, over 20,000 technological R&D staff members, and many world-leading technologies, such as human face recognition, voiceprint recognition, prediction AI technologies, prescription AI technologies and blockchain, which have been applied to hundreds of scenarios,” he said.
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