HONG KONG, Feb. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- China's leading one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform Ping An Healthcare And Technology Company Limited ("Ping An Good Doctor", stock code: 01833.HK) announced its 2018 annual results on February 27. During the reporting period, Ping An Good Doctor recorded a revenue of RMB3.338 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 78.7%. Family doctor services, the core business segment of the company, achieved strong performance and recorded a revenue of RMB411 million, grew significantly with a year-on-year increase of 69.6%.
During the reporting period, Ping An Good Doctor's data performance for users was outstanding. The scale of users continued to expand and the company's monetization significantly improved. The company's constantly improving ecosystem gradually changed users' medical and health management habits. As of the end of 2018, the registered number of users of the company reached 265 million, an increase of 72.4 million compared with the end of 2017; monthly active users (MAU) and monthly paying users (MPU) reached 54.7 million and 2.36 million respectively, representing a year-on-year increase of 85.4% and 86.2%; and the average yearly conversion rate of MPU increased from 2.7% to 3.6%.
Through the integration of the AI-assisted medical team, external doctors and the healthcare service network, Ping An Good Doctor has established a unique business model which creates a closed-loop service between online and offline. The one-stop healthcare ecosystem is becoming more and more complete, covering doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, physical examination centers, cosmetic surgery institutions, insurance and other fields.
As of December 31, 2018, Ping An Good Doctor employed 1,196 medical personnel in its in-house medical team and signed contracts with 5,203 renowned external doctors. The one-hour drug delivery service had entered 86 cities in China, increased from 72 compared with the end of 2017. The medical and healthcare network of the company continued to expand, with additional of 1,500 suppliers compared with the end of 2017. The Company partnered with nearly 400 traditional Chinese medicine clinics, more than 1,300 physical examination centers, more than 1,200 dental clinics and 120 medical beauty clinics, and nearly 47,000 clinics using the Wanjia cloud clinic system.
Ping An Good Doctor established four major business segments: family doctor services, consumer healthcare, health mall, health management and wellness interaction. Among which, the family doctor services business recorded a revenue of RMB411 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 69.6%. This was primarily due to the significant increase of the Health 360 plan and electronic prescription services.
Ping An Good Doctor also created a membership system and actively explored partnerships with insurance companies during the reporting period, the partnership and membership system already became the vital direction of family doctor commercialization. In 2018, the company's membership products in cooperation with commercial insurance companies contributed revenue of RMB200 million, serving nearly 1 million clients. Comparing with the 180 million individual users of Ping An Group, the future opportunity is huge, and the company will continue to promote the cooperation in the insurance aspect in the future.
It is understood that Ping An Good Doctor's business could maintain rapid development and continue to provide users with quality medical and healthcare services, which is inseparable from the support of the company's AI technology capabilities and its own medical team.
Since its establishment, Ping An Good Doctor has been focusing on the research and development of AI-assisted medical systems. By using intelligent speech, semantics analysis and big data technology, Ping An Good Doctor's AI Doctor has gathered nearly 410 million pieces of medical and health consultation data online that covering more than 3,000 types of diseases. The AI Doctor was applied to pre-diagnosis, triage and online medical consultations, greatly improving the efficiency and accuracy of online consultations.The system has been applied to the entire in-house medical team and more than 100 hospitals to improve the efficiency of the consultation. The daily average number of consultations reached 535,000 in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 45.4%.
The company's in-house medical team was also another unique advantage. Currently, Ping An Good Doctor has established a full-time in-house medical team of around 1,196 personnel with licensed doctors who owns 14-year professional experiences. Leveraging on its AI-assisted medical system, Ping An Good Doctor was able to provide users with a full cycle of one-stop services, including 24 X 7 online consultation services, hospital referrals, hospital registration, inpatient arrangements, second opinion services and one-hour drug delivery.
Recently, Citigroup and HSBC both gave Ping An Good Doctor a "Buy" rating with a target price of HK$60 and HK$57 respectively. The two banks both hold positive views of the company on its strong growth and attractive growth prospects.
The article was published on Bloomberg on February 28, 2019.
