The insurance industry continues to face severe internal and external challenges. On the liability side, declining interest rates, stricter regulations, the rise of new energy vehicles, and chaos in non-auto segments persist; on the asset side, short-term capital market volatility has intensified, with geopolitical shocks and the deep evolution of AI technology becoming intertwined. Against this backdrop, how are listed insurers, serving as the industry's benchmark, performing?

On the evening of August 20, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (PING AN) released its first-half 2026 results. The numbers show a solid overall performance: operating revenue reached RMB 575.138 billion, up 15% year-on-year; attributable operating profit stood at RMB 84.196 billion, up 8.3%; net profit attributable to shareholders hit RMB 92.585 billion, a 36.1% increase; and equity attributable to shareholders of the parent company totaled RMB 1.028084 trillion, up 2.8% from the start of the year. However, alongside this stability, the company also faces growth pressures. For instance, insurance service revenue from the life and health segment fell 4.43% year-on-year to RMB 107.156 billion; the non-annualized comprehensive investment yield on the insurance fund investment portfolio dropped 1 percentage point year-on-year to 2.1%; and part of the revenue growth was driven by investment gains rather than core insurance business expansion, making the company more sensitive to investment performance. In the interim report, Ping An Group Chairman Ma Mingzhe remarked, "The journey ahead is long—how to secure peace of mind? Guided by value, cultivated through professionalism, and refined through service."

Adjustments Behind the Ups and Downs

As the core engine of the group, insurance business development has always steered the overall trajectory of Ping An, with the stability of the life and health segment serving as the foundation of the entire group. In the first half of 2026, Ping An's insurance service revenue totaled RMB 279.255 billion, up 0.52% year-on-year. Of this, the life and health segment's insurance service revenue declined 4.43% to RMB 107.156 billion, while the property and casualty segment's insurance service revenue grew 3.8% to RMB 171.879 billion. The decline in life and health insurance service revenue suggests an accelerated shift in business mix, with a significantly larger share of savings-type insurance products. By segment, in the first half of 2026, the life and health business posted an operating profit of RMB 55.872 billion, up 2.3% year-on-year; new business value reached RMB 24.847 billion, up 11.2%. In terms of distribution channels, although the number of agents dropped 7.4% from the end of last year, the per-agent new business value from the agency channel grew 14.1% year-on-year. The bancassurance, community finance, and other channels contributed nearly 40% of the life insurance new business value, up 3.8 percentage points year-on-year. Ping An Life continues to iteratively upgrade product strategies in the agency channel, enriching long-payment-period product offerings and optimizing premium payment structures. In the first half of 2026, the share of long-payment-period new business in the agency channel rose 6 percentage points year-on-year. The bancassurance channel also remains focused on sustainable value growth, with new business value reaching RMB 7.05 billion in the first half, up 18.0% year-on-year.

Additionally, in the low-interest-rate environment, the life insurance industry continues to push forward product mix adjustments and transition toward participating policies, and Ping An is no exception. To enrich floating-benefit product offerings and meet diversified client needs under low-rate conditions, Ping An Life is advancing its participating product transformation, raising the share of participating policies. In the first half of 2026, participating products accounted for over 90% of new business value. At the interim results conference on August 21, Ping An's co-CEO Guo Xiaotao stated that low interest rates are a persistent economic state for now and the foreseeable future. In this environment, interest spreads are a critical metric for the financial industry, and with spreads continuing to narrow, the entire financial sector has entered a stage of stock-market development. Yet, contrary to the broader financial trend, the life insurance industry is entering a golden period, primarily because life insurance products are the only financial instruments capable of offering long-term, stable guaranteed returns in a low-rate environment. To this end, Ping An's life insurance strategy will adhere to four key directions: balanced channels, balanced products, differentiated services, and AI empowerment.

Turning to the property and casualty segment, in the first half of 2026, Ping An P&C achieved original insurance premium income of RMB 178.751 billion, up 4% year-on-year, with new energy vehicle premiums reaching RMB 26.415 billion, up 21.5%. The overall combined ratio improved 0.1 percentage point year-on-year to 95.1%. However, on the profit front, net profit for Ping An P&C fell 12.4% year-on-year to RMB 8.812 billion.

Strong Empowerment from Healthcare and Elderly Care

With accelerated population aging, more insurers are entering the health and elderly care track, and Ping An is no exception, championing the dual strategy of "integrated finance + medical and elderly care," driven by technology. For Ping An, the development of integrated finance relies heavily on the empowerment of medical and elderly care, which has become the most distinctive feature of its growth. According to the company, its medical and elderly care strategy is advancing steadily and continuously empowering core business. In the first half of 2026, Ping An achieved health insurance premium income of RMB 88.7 billion, with medical insurance premiums exceeding RMB 43 billion, up 4.9% year-on-year. In the first half, 11.51 million life insurance customers used medical and elderly care services, and the policy-upgrade rate for customers using these services rose 5.9 percentage points. Customers with medical and health benefits saw their average first-year premium per new life policy increase to 2.6 times, and the retention rate for customers with medical and elderly care ecosystem service rights reached 93%. This represents a unique competitive advantage in the insurance market.

Ping An also boasts an extensive medical resource network. As of June 30, it had over 38,000 partner hospitals, covering 100% of China's top 100 hospitals and tertiary hospitals; nearly 245,000 partner pharmacies, with nationwide pharmacy coverage exceeding 35%, supporting offline medicine purchases via code payment for corporate health management clients; and coverage of 192,000 corporate clients. Data shows that in the first half of 2026, more than 20 million people used Ping An's medical and health services. Notably, with the assistance of AI, Ping An's medical diagnosis and treatment efficiency has improved. In the first half of 2026, over 9.7 million users accessed Ping An's AI doctors, with precise diagnosis covering over 11,300 diseases and an auxiliary diagnosis accuracy rate of 96%; the accuracy rate for AI complex disease multi-disciplinary consultation treatment plans approached 90%.

On the elderly care front, Ping An continues to refine its "home + community + institutional" comprehensive elderly care framework. For home-based care, in the first half of 2026, the "Ping An Home" brand was refreshed, adding new app service windows and transitioning from passive services to proactive health management, with over 320,000 customers qualifying for home elderly care services. For community care, Ping An provides elderly care community selection services for home-care rights holders, offering full-process assistance before, during, and after residency. For institutional care, as of June 30, Ping An's Zhen Yinian high-quality elderly care communities had been established in five cities across six projects, with the Shanghai Yinian City & Jing'an No. 8 and Shenzhen Yinian City & Futian facilities already operational. As Ma Mingzhe noted in the interim report, Ping An is building full-scenario medical and elderly care services that span "on-line, in-hospital, at-home, and at-enterprise," meeting customers' growing demand for quality elderly care and professional health management, and achieving service excellence.

"AI in ALL" Deep Integration

As insurance digital transformation enters deeper waters, technology is no longer just a "nice-to-have" for insurers but a new growth driver and a key tool for raising competitive barriers. For Ping An, technology has long been embedded in its DNA. From early ambitions to "become one of the global leaders in digital innovation and application" to today's "AI in ALL," Ping An's technological prowess is at the forefront of the industry. This year marks Ping An's service year, with the company adhering to technology leadership and AI-driven innovation, deepening AI application in core business areas, and continuously upgrading customer service. At the results conference, Guo Xiaotao stated, "Our AI is not for its own sake, but to leverage vertical data advantages in different business scenarios and empower various operations." According to Guo, Ping An's core AI development focuses on five major areas, an intelligent strategy upgraded from its original digital strategy—the AI in All strategy—encompassing intelligent operations, intelligent management, intelligent business operations, intelligent services, and intelligent marketing. He noted that Ping An has completed AI infrastructure construction and is now in the phase where AI creates value through scenario empowerment.

In April this year, at the service upgrade launch event, Ping An unveiled its "Nine-in-One" plan, consolidating its dozen-plus apps and over 700 million registered internet users into a unified entry point, and introduced the financial industry's first "one-sentence-to-action" AI assistant, "Quick Service." Currently, AI-based inquiry, query, and transaction processing covers 88% of Ping An's business scenarios, serving as a reliable AI assistant for approximately 90 million monthly active customers. According to the interim report, as of June 30, Ping An covered 253 million individual customers. Driven by customer-facing innovations such as Quick Service and global emergency rescue, alongside internal AI engineering initiatives—AI coding, AI operations, and AI office—daily token consumption surged from an average of 30 billion in December 2025 to over 120 billion in June 2026. Based on AI applications, Ping An's operational efficiency has improved rapidly. The interim report highlights that, leveraging breakthroughs in multimodal perception and intelligent reasoning, Ping An P&C successfully addressed the automated recognition and understanding of vast amounts of unstructured, non-standard documents such as new vehicle certificates and customs declarations, applying this to auto insurance intelligent policy issuance, achieving 94% of agency-channel policies issued intelligently within an average of one minute. Using advanced technologies like AI digital robots, intelligent camera recognition, AI claims review, and external data interconnection, Ping An has created the "111 Instant Claims" life insurance claims service, with flash claims accounting for 59% in the first half of 2026. For complex medical documents such as medical records and admission/discharge notes, Ping An P&C broke through technical bottlenecks in understanding precision, applying it to end-to-end automation in non-auto claims, covering nearly one million cases, with 45% of accident and health insurance claims fully automated and the fastest settlement in 51 seconds.

As described, technology has reshaped Ping An's operational processes and customer experience, with AI in ALL deeply embedded in core insurance business workflows including underwriting, claims, and customer service. On one hand, AI is being introduced into insurance operations and service content; on the other, Ping An is ramping up investment in AI. At the conference, Guo Xiaotao stated, "High-dividend stocks are our solid base position, and among growth stocks, we are very bullish on the technology sector, including tech, AI, high-end manufacturing, innovative drugs, and energy-related sectors."