In Shenzhen, a city crawling with high-rises and every struggler’s dream to make good money, who’s the biggest moneymaker? The answer may surprise you. Ranking 33rd on the 2023 Fortune Global 500, Ping An raked in 181.6 billion USD in 2022, making it not just the most profitable firm in Shenzhen but the world’s No.1 insurance company in terms of revenue.
On average, Ping An was making a daily revenue of 3.3 billion yuan and a flabbergasted 200 million yuan in net profit every day. That also makes Ping An one of the biggest taxpayers of the city. In 2022, Ping An paid 115.5 billion yuan in taxes exceeding 100 billion yuan for the fifth year. For every 100 yuan in tax payments collected by the Shenzhen Municipal Government, 4.6 yuan came from Ping An. Nearly half of Ping An's income comes from its insurance business. In the highly concentrated insurance market in China, the top five companies take up more than half of the market. Among them, Ping An has the largest share followed by PICC and China Life Insurance. The other half of Ping An's net profit comes from financial businesses such as banking, asset management, and financial technologies.
By the end of 2022, the total assets of Ping An had exceeded 11 trillion yuan ballooning 200,000 times from its initial assets of 54 million yuan， becoming the world's largest comprehensive financial group in terms of assets. Ping An has approximately 230 million individual customers, almost twice the population of Guangdong province. The success of Ping An, on the one hand, lies in its pioneering efforts in both corporate structure and business layout which can be regarded as an experimental field for the market-oriented reform of China's insurance industry.
Founded in Shekou, Shenzhen, in 1988, Ping An Insurance Company was established as the first joint-stock insurance company in China. In 1994, Ping An brought on board Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as its shareholders, becoming the first financial institution in China to have foreign investors. In the same year, Ping An introduced the individual life insurance marketing system pioneering the individual life insurance business in China.
On the other hand, Ping An has long been deeply engaging in a technology-driven digital transition. Ping An remains focused on evolving its business model introducing digital tools to streamline its operations and provide better service. For example, Ping An’s in-house smart insurance tool provides customers with AI-enabled insurance demand analysis and insurance planning. Its AI Smart Quick Claim system enables the review process of life insurance to be fully automated. The entire process now only takes seconds from up to 2 days before Ping An’s technology-driven healthcare ecosystem enables insurers to go beyond insurance to also meet customers’ healthcare needs. Ping An Health (also known as Ping An Good Doctor) with a healthcare ecosystem integrated with hospitals and medical professionals plus AskBob, an AI-based diagnosis and treatment assistant. The online healthcare platform is able to quickly respond to users’ needs, thus alleviating the stress on the public health system.
Through positively embracing the future and empowering itself with innovations, in the past 35 years, Ping An has grown from a property insurance company to one of the world’s most valuable brands driven by finance and healthcare. Yet it’s perhaps just the beginning of Ping An’s story.
