Seven leading insurance companies conclude their annual reports; equity investments drive overall performance growth

◎Reporter: Han Songhui

As of March 27, the release of the 2025 annual reports by 7 leading listed insurance companies in China—including China Life Insurance, China Property & Casualty Insurance (PICC Property and Casualty), China Taiping, China Taiping (sic), Ping An Insurance, New China Life, Sun Life Insurance Group, and China Taiping—has officially wrapped up, with their performance all seeing substantial growth.

Against the backdrop of major changes in the insurance industry’s policies and market environment in 2025, leading insurers have proactively increased equity allocation in their investment portfolios to drive growth in net profit. According to their annual reports, the net profits attributable to shareholders for China Life, Ping An, China Taiping, PICC Property and Casualty, New China Life, Sun Life Insurance Group, and China Taiping were 154.078 billion yuan, 134.778 billion yuan, 53.505 billion yuan, 46.646 billion yuan, 36.284 billion yuan, 6.31 billion yuan, and 27.059 billion Hong Kong dollars, respectively, up 44.1%, 6.5%, 19.0%, 8.8%, 38.3%, 15.7%, and 220.9% year over year, respectively.

Looking ahead to 2026, asset-liability matching is a shared challenge facing all companies. At performance briefings, management teams of multiple insurers said that strengthening asset-liability management is not only a regulatory requirement, but also a need for the company to build cross-cycle and long-cycle operational and management capabilities. They will overall consider the scientific management of liability duration and flexible adjustment of asset duration to address the asset-liability matching challenges brought by the low-interest-rate environment.

Equity investments reap high returns

Facing a market environment where the long-term interest rate policy pivot is moving downward, the investment side of the seven listed insurance companies faced significant challenges last year. Based on annual report data, all seven listed insurers sought to enhance long-term investment returns by increasing equity asset allocation and optimizing the structure of fixed-income assets.

The seven insurers hold about RMB 16 trillion in investment assets. As of end-2025, the investment asset sizes of China Life, PICC Property and Casualty, China Taiping, New China Life, Sun Life Insurance Group, and China Taiping were RMB 7.42 trillion, RMB 1.90 trillion, RMB 3.04 trillion, RMB 1.84 trillion, RMB 640.2 billion, and RMB 1.74 trillion in Hong Kong dollars, respectively; Ping An’s insurance funds investment portfolio size was RMB 6.49 trillion.

Overall, the investment yield rates of each insurer are impressive: China Life achieved its best investment performance in recent years, with a total investment yield rate of 6.09%; New China Life’s total investment yield rate rose by 0.8 percentage points year over year to 6.6%; Ping An’s insurance funds’ composite investment yield rate was 6.3%; and the total investment yield rates of PICC Property and Casualty and China Taiping were both 5.7%.

Actively taking the lead in equity investments is a shared choice. As of end-2025, China Life’s listed-market equity investment size exceeded RMB 1.2 trillion, up more than RMB 450 billion from the beginning of the year. The allocation ratio of stocks and funds increased from 12.18% to 16.89%. Ping An increased the balanced allocation of dividend-value and technology-growth type equity; PICC Property and Casualty added net purchases of more than RMB 40 billion of A-share stocks, with the equity allocation ratio in the secondary market rising by 4.3 percentage points.

In an interview with a reporter from Shanghai Securities News, Cai Zhiwei, vice president of PICC Property and Casualty, said: “This year, on the one hand, the company continues to focus on OCI high-dividend high-specularity stock allocation; on the other hand, it focuses on the growth-oriented investment opportunities embedded in the ‘Fifteenth Five-Year and Fifteenth Five-Year’ planning, strengthens research on key industries and key industrial sectors, and makes reasonable plans for TPL stock allocation.”

Fixed-income assets are the basic “core holding” of insurers’ funds investments; the companies generally focus on duration matching and adopt a “buy when prices are favorable / allocate when valuations are high” strategy. Liu Hui, vice president of China Life, said that in the past few years the company seized opportunities when interest rates were high and long-term bonds were available, and increased long-term bond allocation across cycles; it has now accumulated RMB 3 trillion in long-term bonds. Ping An actively responded to the risk of interest-rate declines and proactively allocated to interest-rate-linked bonds when opportunities were favorable.

Significant jump in new business value

In recent years, regulators have continued to promote reforms in the predetermined interest rate for life insurance products and the “report-and-file with unified execution” reform of sales channels, placing life insurance business under significant transformation pressure.

Listed life insurers generally have strongly developed floating-income-type business, further optimizing their business mix: China Life’s floating-income-type business achieved robust growth, with its share in first-year premium payments for single-premium and initial-premium policies nearing 50%; Taikang Property? (sic) Life’s share of dividend-linked insurance in new policy single-premium and initial-premium payments has been raised to 50%; and China Taiping Life in 2025 achieved nearly 90% of total premium from dividend-linked insurance across all channels as a share of premium from long-term insurance.

Li Jingsong, general manager of Taikang Property? (sic) Life, said: “Looking ahead to 2026, the development of the bank-insurance channel is in a strategic opportunity period. It will drive the continued optimization of business structure, increase the proportion of floating-income-type products, and significantly raise the share of single-premium and high-value business.”

Business transformation drove a large rise in business value: China Life’s new business value from one year was RMB 45.752 billion, up 35.7% year over year; Ping An’s new business value for life and health insurance grew 29.3% year over year to RMB 36.897 billion; Taikang Property? (sic) Life’s new business value grew 40.1% year over year to RMB 18.609 billion; and PICC Property and Casualty Life’s new business value grew 64.5% year over year to RMB 8.229 billion.

“In 2026, our individual insurance (agent) channel will continue to push forward the deepening reform of the marketing system, continuously optimize the business structure, and drive a year-long realization of a qualitative effective improvement alongside stable growth in volume.” said Lan Yonghong, assistant to the president of China Life.

Auto insurance profitability improves, differentiation in non-auto insurance intensifies

Compared with life insurance’s strong momentum, the property and casualty (P&C) business overall has entered a stage of steady growth and structural optimization, and control of the combined ratio has become the key test for insurers’ underwriting profitability.

Judging from the annual reports of various insurers, cost-reduction and efficiency-improvement results have started to show. The combined ratios of PICC P&C, Ping An P&C, Taikang P&C, and China Taiping P&C were optimized to 97.6%, 96.8%, 97.5%, and 98.8%, respectively, down 0.9, 1.5, 1.1, and 1.3 percentage points year over year, respectively. This led to an improvement in underwriting profit. PICC P&C, Ping An P&C, and Taikang P&C achieved underwriting profits of RMB 12.443 billion, RMB 10.717 billion, and RMB 4.836 billion, respectively, up 75.6%, 96.2%, and 81.0% year over year, respectively.

All insurers effectively controlled claim rates for new energy vehicle insurance, bringing improvements in auto insurance business quality: Ping An P&C’s auto insurance combined ratio was optimized to 95.8%, down 2.3 percentage points year over year; PICC P&C’s auto insurance business combined ratio was optimized to 95.3%, with underwriting profit up 53.6% year over year to RMB 14.258 billion; Taikang P&C’s auto insurance combined ratio fell 2.6 percentage points year over year to 95.6%.

Zhang Daoming, a member of the Party Committee of PICC Property and Casualty, said: “Due to factors such as improved driving behavior habits and advances in assisted driving technology, the claim rate for new energy vehicles has shown a downward trend. We expect that in 2026 the combined ratio for new energy vehicle insurance will further improve, and the level of profitability will rise.”

Meanwhile, non-auto insurance is at a critical period for adjusting the structure and improving quality: PICC P&C’s non-auto insurance business share increased to 45.0%, including underwriting profit in accidental injury and health insurance up 154.1% year over year; Taikang P&C significantly reduced the scale of individual credit guarantee insurance business; and Ping An P&C’s guarantee insurance business turned losses into profits.

(Editor: Qian Xiaorui)

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