Recently, the insurance company Ping An handed over a mid-year report card that exceeded expectations, causing market attention, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Damo and Motong have given them a new rating to raise the target price, and the enthusiastic response of the capital market is the best example, ping an of China has risen by more than 8.6% in just 3 days.
Among them, Ping An Group's financial technology company listed in New York and Hong Kong, OCFT.US/06638.HK, released its first interim performance report since its return to Hong Kong.
According to the data, in the first half of 2022, the operating income of OneConnect was 2.15 billion yuan, an increase of 20.4% year-on-year, and the gross profit was 759 million yuan, an increase of 24.8% year-on-year; Q2 revenue was RMB1.13 billion, up 17.2% year-on-year, and gross margin increased by 2.1 percentage points year-on-year to 36.2%.
At the same time, the company issued the latest board resolution announcement, and executive director and CEO Shen Chongfeng succeeded Ye Wangchun as chairman, and the relevant appointments took effect immediately.
From the IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 to the dual major listing of Hong Kong this year, from the proposed "one body, two wings" strategic 2.0 transformation, to the steady growth of this year's performance & the sharp narrowing of losses, these all show that OneConnect continues to correct its strategic direction and value coordinates under the new situation, and gradually opens up a new situation through a series of intensive upgrades and changes.
Welcome the general to hand over the baton in the critical period
As a fintech company listed on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, OneConnect mainly provides digital banking solutions and digital insurance solutions to customers, and provides solutions covering digital infrastructure through the Gama platform to help financial institutions accelerate the pace of their digital transformation.
Ye Wangchun, who has just completed his chairmanship, is the founder of OneConnect and has been the chairman since December 2015.
As a veteran who has held important positions in Ping An Bank, Huaxia Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and People's Bank of China, and has been immersed in the financial field for more than 40 years, Ye Wangchun has built a unique "technology + business" business model for OneConnect, leading the company to grow into an important player in China's financial services field in just a few years.
In 2019, OneConnect successfully landed on the US stock IPO; In 2022, the Company achieved a dual major listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
It can be said that Ye Wangchun is the soul of OneConnect "from 0 to 1" to become a well-known enterprise in the field of commercial technology in China and bring it to the big stage of the capital market. Now that he has reached the age of retirement, 52-year-old Shen Chongfeng has taken over as chairman, which is the best choice for OneConnect, which is in the critical period of the second stage of "customer deep cultivation" development.
Although Shen Chongfeng only joined OneConnect last year, he has a very impressive resume in the field of business technology services and more than 20 years of experience in the field of SaaS software, he served as senior vice president, president and rotating president of Kingdee Software (China), and has undergone three transformations and changes of Kingdee, leading the enterprise to accelerate the transformation to cloud services and SaaS, showing strong transformative power and organizational leadership.
During his tenure as CEO in the past year, Shen Chongfeng spared no effort in the company's strategic upgrade landing, product standardization and intelligence, key customer expansion, etc. In the first half of 2022 alone, OneConnect's various products have cumulatively updated and iterated more than 40 versions, which has laid a solid technical foundation for the company's second-stage start.
Therefore, for Shen Chongfeng's appointment, the board of directors gave a high degree of trust and evaluation, saying that "he is very suitable for the company's development of the second stage of the 'customer deep ploughing' strategy, is the best person to lead the company to achieve upgrading and transformation." ”
Review the results of the new strategy
According to the financial report, on the basis of the continuous improvement of one-quarter performance, OneConnect continued to maintain a steady growth trend in the second quarter, revenue and gross profit rose steadily, while the adjusted net loss ratio narrowed sharply by 17.3 percentage points to 18.8% year-on-year, and under macroeconomic pressure in the first half of the year, the key indicators continued to improve.
Behind the performance growth, the company's determination to continuously correct the strategic direction and business coordinates under the new situation is projected.
Prior to this, OneConnect had accumulated a broad customer base in the process of providing full-stack solutions for financial institutions. Since the company's inception, 100% of China's state-owned and joint-stock banks, 98% of city commercial banks, 63% of property and casualty insurance companies and 49% of life insurance institutions have used at least one of its products.
Shen Chongfeng's joining has determined two core keywords for the 2.0 stage of the OneConnect strategy - customer deep ploughing and product upgrading, further accelerating the upgrading and iteration of the company's product services and solutions, and providing key support for the landing of the company's second-stage "customer deep cultivation" strategy.
In the first half of the year, OneConnect has cumulatively updated and iterated more than 40 versions of various products, aiming to further improve product performance, improve standardization functions, and promote the sustainable growth of subscription revenue. Benefiting from the overall improvement of product strength, the number of high-quality + customers of the company increased by 18.6% year-on-year from 113 in the same period of 2021 to 134.
For example, in the retail banking sector, OneConnect focused on creating benchmarking cases for product deepening among existing financial institution customers this year. For example, in the cooperation with a large urban commercial bank with trillion-level assets in East China and a rural commercial bank with an asset scale of more than 500 billion yuan in South China, the two sides initially cooperated from a single product such as retail digital transformation design and intelligent marketing as the entry point, but then in the process of cooperation, OneConnect won high recognition and good reputation from banks, and the two sides gradually expanded the cooperation field to intelligent retail middle office and intelligent wealth management.
In general, while empowering financial institutions to improve their operational efficiency and business accuracy, we also see that the close cooperation between OneConnect and customers is also deepening, and the stickiness of single customers' use of OneConnect products continues to increase, coupled with the reduction of marginal costs brought about by technological upgrading, which has laid a good foundation for the company's second-stage operation.
With the digital economy booming, the outlook for the fintech services industry remains imaginative. From the perspective of the industry, we also see that the fintech service industry is ushering in some positive new changes.
On the one hand, the state's strict supervision of the Internet industry has clearly entered the final stage, so that the market's expectations for the financial services industry have begun to improve, and the risk of uncertainty from regulatory policy changes is greatly reduced.
On the other hand, after the supervision and industry reshuffle, China's commercial technology service industry has become more standardized and orderly, and the definition of development direction and business boundaries has become clearer than before. After the industry grows from barbaric to standardized development, it can re-stimulate the vitality of the industry to deepen its progress and the firm development confidence of enterprises.
epilogue
From the resilience and business upgrading trend of OneConnect in the interim report, we have seen the strong demand for digital transformation of financial institutions, and witnessed the orderly maturity of the digital financial services ecosystem in mainland China.
Although the current macro economy is still facing many challenges under the influence of various complex factors, under the general trend of global digital transformation, OneConnect is preparing for development, and it is worth waiting to see what kind of acceleration will run under the leadership of the new helmsman Shen Chongfeng.
This article originated from Grand Gateway