Ping An Insurance records 1.2% growth in operating profit

Chinese insurance giant Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China Ltd said it will continue to step up investment in technology to empower its main financial business.

"Our technology business achieved a good performance in the first half of the year, with operating profit growing 22.7 percent year-on-year," the group's Co-CEO Jessica Tan said at the company's 2020 interim results announcement in Shenzhen on Friday.

"We will continue to increase our investment in technology so that it can better empower our main business," she said, adding that the company now has eight research institutes and 57 laboratories.

More efforts will also be made on better integrating the company's ecosystems in healthcare, auto services and other areas with its financial business, she added.

Despite the impact from the coronavirus outbreak, technology business of Ping An generated about 42.73 billion yuan ($6.23 billion) in revenue in the first six months of the year, increasing 11.2 percent year-on-year. 

The Shenzhen-headquartered company reported 74.31 billion yuan in operating profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company in the first half, rising 1.2 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. 

Net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company, however, dropped by 29.7 percent year-on-year to 68.68 billion yuan. 

Responding to the reasons of decline in net profit, Co-CEO and CFO Jason Yao said Ping An is the only insurance company in the country that adopted the new accounting standard of IFRS 9.

"The impact of adopting this standard is that it would lead to bigger fluctuations in net profit…Moreover, the coronavirus epidemic has also affected our business," he said. "We hope investors would pay more attention to operating profit which reflects the medium and long-term trend of our development better."

Share price of the company added 1.76 percent to finish at 77.89 yuan on Shanghai Stock Exchange on Friday, while on Hong Kong bourse it edged down 0.12 percent to end at HK$83.3.

The company will pay an interim dividend of 0.8 yuan per share in cash, up 6.7 percent from a year earlier.