HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, June 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEx:2318; SSE:601318) presented the technology achievements that underpin its "Finance + Ecosystem" strategy at the sixth annual Goldman Sachs TechNet Conference Asia Pacific 2020 on 20 May. The virtual conference featured leading enterprises from around the world in internet, technology and mobile/telecom industries.
Jessica Tan, Co-CEO of Ping An Group said, "The way Ping An became a technology company is different from others. There is one thing unique to us: business use cases. Given the depth and breadth of our offline and online businesses, we can train our technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on really deep business scenarios. That is our unique advantage versus any other tech company."
Ping An has made major strides in technology and innovation: it has incubated 11 technology businesses with annual revenues of more than USD11 billion, and established eight research institutes with over 35,000 developers and 2,600 scientists, leading to more than 21,000 technology patent applications. The Group was globally ranked first and second in published patent applications for fintech and healthtech respectively in 2019.
Jessica commented, "Ping An's philosophy of incubating new business focuses on sectors that are important to consumers and GDP, such as financial services, health care, auto services, real estate services and smart city services. We have focused on these five ecosystems for the last 10 years."
These ecosystems have established market-leading positions for Ping An in many areas:
"Ping An takes its technology companies through four stages of development, which allows Ping An to be nimble in managing different companies at different stages without killing them prematurely," Jessica said. "Stage one is testing value propositions. Stage two, we look at traffic scale. Stage three is the ability to monetize that traffic, which is revenue. Finally, profitability comes at the last stage."
Since the global outbreak of COVID-19 earlier this year, Ping An has taken on the challenge of meeting changing customer needs. Jessica noted, "The pandemic has forced Ping An to support digital services better than ever."
Demand skyrocketed for Ping An's healthtech services. Between 22 January to 10 February 2020, there were 1.11 billion visits to Ping An Good Doctor's app. Between 22 January to 6 February as the outbreak peaked in China, the number of new registered users increased by 10 times compared with the period from 1 to 21 January, and the number of daily online medical consultations increased by nine times. In Indonesia, GrabHealth – launched in late 2019 by Ping An Good Doctor and ride-hailing company Grab – hired hundreds of doctors as COVID-19 caused demand for online consultations in the country to almost double.
"Business and government needs have also been impacted by the pandemic," Jessica said. "The COVID-19 situation has forced business and government to accelerate a shift to online services. For example, financial institutions are now more willing to digitalize their process, and in the area of government regulation, social health insurance payments are now starting to be accepted online. Other traditional offline industries are likely to follow."
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About Ping An Group
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An") is a world-leading technology-powered retail financial services group. With over 204 million retail customers and 534 million Internet users, Ping An is one of the largest financial services companies in the world.
Ping An has two over-arching strategies, "pan financial assets" and "pan health care", which focus on the provision of financial and healthcare services through our integrated financial services platform and our five ecosystems of financial services, health care, auto services, real estate services and smart city services. Our "finance + technology" and "finance + ecosystem" strategies aim to provide customers and internet users with innovative and simple products and services using technology. As China's first joint stock insurance company, Ping An Group is committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate reporting and corporate governance. The Company is listed on the stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
In 2020, Ping An ranked 7th in the Forbes Global 2000 list. In 2019, Ping An ranked 29th on the Fortune Global 500 list. Ping An also ranked 40th in the 2019 WPP Millward Brown BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list. For more information, please visit www.pingan.cn.