Invested in 47 retirement community projects, with more than 84,000 beds——
Insurance companies "grab the beach" pension community
Our reporter Li Chenyang Guo Ziyuan
“At present, 10 insurance institutions have invested in 47 elderly care community projects with more than 84,000 beds. At the same time, insurance funds are invested in the industry through direct equity and indirect equity investment in the elderly and private equity investment in the upstream and downstream medical and health industries of the elderly care industry. The fund is more than 234 billion yuan." Cao Deyun, secretary of the party committee of the China Insurance Asset Management Association, said recently.
In recent years, large insurance companies represented by Taikang, Ping An, Xinhua, etc. have made frequent efforts to invest in retirement communities, and "insurance + retirement" has increasingly become an important direction for the development of life insurance companies.
The retirement community is becoming a climate
The reporter learned during the interview that head insurance companies such as China Life, Ping An, Taikang Life, and Xinhua Insurance have deployed retirement communities, and the area is not limited to first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou.
Take Taikang Life, which entered the elderly care community earlier, as an example. The company entered the medical care field in 2007 and obtained the industry's first retirement community investment pilot qualification in 2009.
At present, the Taikang Home Elderly Community has been deployed in 22 key cities in the core areas of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Southwest, and China. It can accommodate about 55,000 elderly people. Seven elderly care communities have been put into operation. , Nearly 4,500 elderly people stayed.
In May of this year, Ping An of China released the health care brand and its first high-end elderly care community product line. Through the innovative development model combining "finance + medical care + health care", it integrates the company's superior resources in the financial, medical and technological fields to create high-quality products. Health care services.
Yang Zheng, Secretary of the Party Committee of Ping An Life, said that in the face of the aging trend, insurance will play an important supplementary role to the national social security system. It is not only a provider of pension support insurance products, but also an important investment force in health care infrastructure. An important provider of support services.
Li Quan, Secretary of the Party Committee and President of Xinhua Insurance, introduced that in recent years, Xinhua Insurance has followed industry trends, actively developed a product model that combines life insurance and pensions, and gave full play to its advantages of long term and large scale of insurance funds, and deployed health insurance in key cities across the country. Raise the industry.
It is reported that Xinhua Insurance has created the "Xinhua Home" elderly care community brand, and designed three product lines of "Lexiang", "Yixiang" and "Exclusive" to meet the different elderly needs of vitality, continuous care, and rehabilitation care.
According to the results of the seventh national census released by the National Bureau of Statistics a few days ago, my country’s population of 60 years and over is 264.02 million, accounting for 18.70%.
Among them, the population of 65 years and over is 190.64 million, accounting for 13.50%.
Compared with 2010, the proportion of the population aged 60 and above increased by 5.44 percentage points.
According to market analysts, as the demographic structure changes, pension insurance will be the main battlefield for the development of the life insurance industry in the future.
Insurance companies combine the rights and interests of customers in the retirement community with insurance policies to provide customers with comprehensive retirement services that integrate finance, medical care, and care, which is also a better way to meet market demand.
Synergies are emerging
Wang Xujin, director of the Insurance Research Center of Beijing Technology and Business University, said in an interview with a reporter from the Economic Daily: “Insurance companies are actively'grabbing' the pension field and continuously accelerating investment in the construction of pension communities. On the one hand, they are optimistic about the market prospects; on the other hand, they are current life insurance. The duration of corporate debt is increasing, and a large amount of insurance funds require long-term investment, and the long-term nature of the pension industry and insurance funds naturally fits.” Indeed, the aging of the population in China is an important trend in social development, and it is also the basic national condition for a long period of time in the future. .
For the insurance industry, the pension industry chain spawned by the "silver economy" has become a battleground in the industry.
It is worth noting that most of the current retirement community projects are high-end product lines. Customers obtain the qualifications for staying by purchasing corresponding insurance products, but the “threshold” for staying is above one million yuan.
In this regard, a product manager of an insurance company confessed to reporters that the company's high-end retirement community is mainly for the company's existing high-end customers.
It is understood that large insurance companies have been operating for many years and have accumulated many high-net-worth customers. Now they can directly introduce high-end customers to the retirement community and provide them with more additional services, which can better leverage the synergy between the main insurance business and the retirement community.
Although the main synergy effect currently lies in the right to stay in the insurance policy, from the products launched by many insurance companies, insurance companies cut into the pension community and customize various types of rehabilitation treatments for customers, including private doctors, health butlers, And the green medical referral channel is designed to effectively match the investment and protection needs of customers throughout the life cycle, so as to achieve the unification of the increase in the income of the elderly community and the increase in the number and scale of insurance policies.
It is not difficult to see that the investment of insurance companies to build retirement communities does not simply allocate insurance funds to retirement institutions. More importantly, it integrates the risk management functions of insurance with the wealth management needs of customers and the gap in medical care services.
From the perspective of the industrial chain created by insurance companies, the pension community can connect upwards with products such as pension insurance, medical insurance, and nursing insurance, and the downstream can drive nursing services, senior colleges and other industries, greatly extend and expand the life insurance industry chain, and make insurance products compatible with The organic integration of elderly care entities helps to solve the elderly care problems faced by my country's population aging process.
The future of transformation and development can be expected
In the first quarter of this year, the net profit of 79 life insurance companies was 77.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7.8 billion yuan.
From the data point of view, although the performance of life insurance companies has recovered after the impact of the epidemic, there is still a gap of nearly 40% compared with the 125.9 billion yuan in the same period in 2019.
This also confirms the judgment of many people in the industry. After experiencing the rapid growth from 2013 to 2017, how life insurance companies can continue to maintain positive growth in performance, and the combination of medical and elderly care may be a road to transformation worth looking forward to.
Cao Deyun said that whether it is a large-scale asset-heavy pension community, or asset-light pension services, or pension-related insurance products such as long-term care insurance and health medical insurance, insurance institutions' overall industrial chain layout in the pension field is providing pension funds. The construction of the third pillar to extend the industrial format is conducive to improving the quality and level of comprehensive elderly care services.
The reporter's investigation found that most of the pension communities supported by insurance companies are currently at a loss.
On the one hand, the investment cycle of pension institutions is long, and the initial investment is large; on the other hand, the later operation requires professionals, and the operating cost remains high.
Wang Xujin believes that "although most of the pension communities invested by insurance companies have not yet achieved profitability, there is still a lot of room for the development of the pension community industry in my country. With the expansion of the pension community and the increase in occupancy rates, it is expected to become a profit growth point for insurance companies in the future." .
Chen Dongsheng, chairman of Taikang Insurance Group, once said that pension is a long-term, slow-returning service industry. From an international perspective, the mature pension service industry has stable income around 8%, which is in line with the nature of long-term life insurance funds.
In fact, the entry of insurance companies into the retirement community is still in its infancy in my country. Whether the quality of service can attract the elderly to live for a long time and whether the operating costs can be continuously optimized are crucial.
Some experts also believe that the pension community that insurance companies are currently doing is expensive. In fact, the parallel development of high-end and low-end pension institutions can promote market segmentation and standardize the quality of pension services.
It is worth noting that, in order to accelerate the development of commercial pension insurance, better serve the construction of a multi-level and multi-pillar pension insurance system, and actively meet the diverse needs of the people for pension protection, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission recently issued the "Regarding the Development of Exclusive Commercial Pension Insurance Pilot Programs" "Notice", starting from June 1, 2021, six family life insurance companies will launch exclusive commercial endowment insurance pilots in Zhejiang Province (including Ningbo City) and Chongqing City. The pilot period is tentatively set for one year.
It is reported that the contents of the pilot program include that insurance companies should innovate and develop exclusive commercial endowment insurance products that are easy to insure, flexible in payment, and stable in return.
Consumers who reach the age of 60 years and above can receive pensions, and the period of receipt is not less than 10 years.
Under the premise of effective risk isolation, pilot insurance companies are encouraged to actively explore the connection of the development of exclusive commercial pension insurance business with pension and care services to meet differentiated pension needs.