Live Performance Meeting | China Pacific Property & Casualty Insurance General Manager Chen Hui: New energy household vehicle business has entered a stable profit zone

By China Daily Business News Reporter | Tu Yinghao    By China Daily Business News Editor | Zhang Yiming

On March 27, China Pacific Insurance (Group) convened its 2025 annual results briefing. The company’s management responded to hot-button issues of market concern, including new energy vehicle insurance, its AI (artificial intelligence) investment plans, and the insurance agency and bancassurance business.

In 2025, the premium income from new energy vehicle insurance of Taiping Property & Casualty Insurance reached RMB 25.017 billion, accounting for 22.6% of its overall auto insurance business, up 5.6 percentage points year over year.

“This is thanks to the company’s earlier strategic layout for new energy.” Chen Hui, general manager of Taiping Property & Casualty Insurance, said that overall business costs for new energy vehicle insurance have improved significantly, and new energy passenger car household business has entered a stable profit-making range.

“‘AI+’ is one of China Pacific Insurance Group’s three major strategies.” Yü Bin, vice president of China Pacific Insurance (Group), said that in recent years Taiping has continued to increase its investment in artificial intelligence. According to the planning targets, the AI investment budget’s compound annual growth rate over the next two years will be no less than 40%. The company will promote enterprise-wide improvement in AI literacy and build a high-caliber team of AI professionals, technical talent, and strategic talent.

Image at the earnings briefing session: Photo source: China Daily Business News reporter Tu Yinghao

Bancassurance: In the six major state-owned banks, market share rose 0.3 percentage points year over year

In 2025, Taiping Life Insurance’s bancassurance channel achieved scale premium income of RMB 61.618 billion, up 46.4% year over year. Among this, premium income from new business with regular payment terms was RMB 16.956 billion, up 43.2% year over year.

Li Jingsong, general manager of Taiping Life Insurance, said that in optimizing the product mix and structure, on the one hand, the company will continue to promote optimization of channel structure, achieving comprehensive business cooperation relationships with all six major state-owned banks. It has established a channel operation and management system that is more closely aligned with the operational mechanisms of the state-owned banks. Taiping’s market share in the six major state-owned banks rose 0.3 percentage points year over year. At the same time, it will explore integrated development with joint-stock banks; in the share held in joint-stock banks, Taiping has maintained a leading position, and the overall channel structure is more balanced.

On the other hand, Taiping will accelerate the optimization of its product structure, gradually increasing the proportion of 5-year regular-payment business, and making product categories more diversified. The integration of production and service operations will be driven further; services such as Taiping Health, Enjoy Home Club, and Taiping Home have been recognized by an increasing number of banks and customers, and the utilization rate of service benefits rose 10 percentage points year over year.

In terms of customer tiering and classified management, in 2025, the proportion of Taiping Life Insurance’s customers in the middle-category and above (as defined) was 28.1%, up 5.4 percentage points year over year. Of this, the agent channel accounted for 26.6%, up 5.1 percentage points; the bancassurance channel accounted for 41.0%, up 1.8 percentage points. The number of high-value and very-high-value customers both increased rapidly.

When discussing tiered and classified management, Li Jingsong said the company has conducted detailed customer profiling and analysis: first, women purchase more insurance; second, the insured customers are older; third, the proportion of customers in second-tier cities and above has increased significantly.

What additional measures will further develop customers next? Li Jingsong revealed that, relying on a content factory to provide a vast amount of consulting content, the company will tailor event-specific professional tools to precisely match different customers’ needs and effectively enhance customer stickiness. At the same time, with the help of intelligent tools, the company will convert complex customer operations processes—such as customer inventorying, needs diagnostics, product recommendations, and event invitations—into executable and traceable standardized actions, lowering the threshold for customer operations.

Property & Casualty: Expected that by end-2026, all risk in personal credit guarantee insurance will be fully cleared

According to annual report data, in 2025, Taiping Property & Casualty’s premium income from new energy vehicle insurance reached RMB 25.017 billion, providing coverage for more than 6.3 million new energy vehicles.

“From the outlook on future operations, the substitution trend for new energy vehicles will still continue. The company will further optimize costs and improve efficiency by building an ecosystem across the entire lifecycle.” Chen Hui said that there are two key areas: first, improving operating efficiency. The company will continue to optimize the proprietary online underwriting and cloud claims mechanism and build a dedicated customer-operations team, which has already covered the industry’s mainstream brands. Second, in claims-stage management, the company will implement brand-focused centralized management and export claims standards such as large-battery repair and waterlogged vehicle handling to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). By directly connecting with automotive companies’ after-sales systems, jointly building AI loss-assessment and pricing models, and relying on the Joint Data Laboratory to implement vehicle-machine data application, the company will fundamentally reduce risk exposure and precisely lower costs.

In addition, in building its ecosystem, the company will continue to enrich quality assurance and exclusive charging-scenario products, and will deeply participate in the formulation of national-level industry standards, such as battery thermal runaway and repair processes.

Due to proactive adjustments to its business structure, in 2025 Taiping Property & Casualty’s personal credit guarantee insurance business’s original premium income was -RMB 1.6917 billion. The scale was compressed by RMB 5.521 billion compared with the previous year, and the risk exposure narrowed significantly. After removing the impact of personal credit guarantee insurance, the comprehensive cost ratio for underwriting non-auto insurance was 97.0%, down 2.1 percentage points year over year.

Chen Hui said that in early 2025, Taiping Property & Casualty proactively adjusted its personal credit guarantee insurance business. Since the adjustment, both assets under coverage and risk exposure have declined month by month. The company expects that by end-2026, all risks in personal credit guarantee insurance will be fully cleared, and the overall impact on the costs of non-auto insurance in 2026 will be very small.

Regarding the implementation of “reporting and operating under a unified framework (baoxian tong xing)” for non-auto insurance, Chen Hui said that Taiping Property & Casualty has already completed the filing and reporting of relevant insurance product types and optimized the systems. Going forward, the company will, as an opportunity for industry-wide comprehensive governance, strictly implement filing provisions and requirements and continuously improve a mechanism for rate lookbacks and dynamic adjustments. As of February 2026, the company’s expense ratio has declined. From a medium-to-long term perspective, comprehensive governance will help improve the market backdrop, optimize the cost-effectiveness of non-auto insurance, and promote the evolution of non-auto insurance operations from an expense-driven model to a high-quality model driven by technology and services.

Investment: Increased the allocation ratio to equity assets last year and achieved good returns

In 2025, China Pacific Insurance achieved net investment income of RMB 85.199 billion, up 2.9% year over year. The net investment income yield was 3.4%, down 0.4 percentage points year over year. Total investment income was RMB 141.634 billion, up 17.6% year over year; total investment income yield was 5.7%, up 0.1 percentage point year over year. The comprehensive investment return rate was 6.1%, up 0.1 percentage point year over year.

Su Gang, vice president of China Pacific Insurance (Group), Chief Investment Officer, and in charge of finance, said that in 2025, whether in A-shares or H-shares, markets rose significantly. In particular, the technology sector performed strongly. China Pacific Insurance, based on its assessment of the macroeconomy and capital markets, optimized its asset allocation strategy, increased the allocation ratio to equity assets, and achieved good returns.

When discussing how to effectively enhance the equity investment proportion in public markets, Su Gang said that this action is both a response to the call for insurance funds, as long-term funds, to increase efforts to invest in the market, and also an intrinsic requirement for asset-liability management within the insurance group itself.

Su Gang said that the dividend-value core strategy that Taiping has long upheld is highly evident in its stability and sustainability. The strategy focuses on listed companies that combine relatively strong dividend distribution capabilities with stable growth prospects. Using such high-quality assets as the core bottom position, it can not only capture dividend income in the form of cash flows and improve the net investment income yield, but also share the capital returns brought by stable performance growth. At the same time, around the core strategy, the company will continue to build a more comprehensive satellite strategy system, covering multiple key areas such as technology innovation, healthy living, and consumption.

When discussing solvency, Su Gang said that China Pacific Insurance (Group)’s solvency in 2025 improved significantly. The key lies in the sustained improvement of operating quality and efficiency of major insurance subsidiaries, as well as the optimization of asset-liability measurement and matching.

It is understood that, to further optimize asset-liability matching and measurement management and more comprehensively reflect the company’s operating situation, at the end of 2025 Taiping Life Insurance implemented reclassification of fixed-income assets. Specifically, financial assets previously classified as held-to-maturity were reclassified to available-for-sale financial assets. This effectively hedged the impact of market interest rate fluctuations on the liability side, and more truly reflected the company’s solvency. This is also a relatively common practice in the industry in recent years.

Cover image source: Photo by China Daily Business News reporter Tu Yinghao