Ping An Insurance adopts new bookkeeping to highlight policyholders, saying it should be valued as an internet financial services provider

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, the country’s largest insurer by market value, has adjusted its disclosure method to focus on earnings generated by an individual customer, as it endeavours to be valued as an internet financial services provider rather than a traditional insurer.

“We are a 7-Eleven for financial and life products,” Lee Yuan Siong, executive vice president and chief insurance business officer said in a conference in Xiamen.

The company recorded 195 yuan interim profit from every financial customer, compared with 280 yuan for the whole year in 2015, Lee said, adding that it will continue to disclose the number in its financial reporting.

Return on equity at its retail business reached 13.4 per cent in the first half, compared with 19.6 per cent for the whole year last year.

Ping An, with 27 subsidiaries offering services such as life insurance, banking, investment planning and online medical consultation, had 342 million individual customers as of the end of June, among whom nearly 122 million are financial customers and 298 million are internet users, according to its filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday.

Customer numbers had been growing at 20 per cent a year, which Lee describes as “four times Singapore’s population”.