Ping An Insurance has announced an operating profit of RMB104.06 billion (US$14.7 billion) for the first nine months of 2019, marking an increase of 21.5% year-on-year.
The Shenzhen, China-headquartered insurer said in a statement that aside from the growth in profit, customer development also yielded strong results. As of September 30, the group had over 200 million retail customers, up 9.5% from the beginning of the year, and 594 million internet users, up 10.4% from the beginning of the year.
In the first nine months of 2019, Ping An acquired 29.72 million new customers, of whom 11.58 million (39%) were sourced from internet users within the group’s five ‘ecosystems’, namely: finance, health care, automobile, smart city initiatives, and housing.
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Ping An said that for the first nine months of 2019, its insurance business worked to sharpen its focus on protection. It sought to optimise the product portfolio and prioritise sales of high-value, high-protection products. Operating profit of the life and health insurance business reached RMB69.1 billion, up 30.5% year on year. New business value (NBV) grew by 4.5% year-on-year to RMB58.8 billion, mainly due to the increasing contribution of the NBV margin, which reached 48.1%, up 5.3 percentage points from the same period last year.
Meanwhile, Ping An’s property & casualty business recorded premium income of RMB196.87 billion, up 8.7% year-on-year. Operating profit increased by 75.5% to RMB14.25 billion. Combined ratio was 96.2%, outperforming the industry average. According to Ping An Property & Casualty, its AI-powered Ping An Auto Owner app with image-based loss assessment technology also had a success rate of 95% in assessing external damage to vehicles following accidents.
