Q4 2023 Huize Holding Ltd Earnings Call
Participants
Harriet Hu; Investor Relations Director; Huize Holding Ltd
Ma Cunjun; Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer; Huize Holding Ltd
Ronald Tam; Co-Chief Financial Officer; Huize Holding Ltd
Amy Chen; Analyst; Citi
CoCo Gong; Analyst; Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd.
Yuyu Zhang; Analyst; CICC
Presentation
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Huize Holding Limited's fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Today's conference call is being recorded and a webcast replay will be available. Please visit Huize's IR website at ir.huize.com under the Events and Webcasts section.
I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker host today, Ms. Harriet Hu, Huize's Investor Relations Director. Please go ahead, Harriet.
Harriet Hu
Thank you, Sarah. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023. Our financial and operating results were released earlier today and are currently available on both our IR website and the Newswire.
Before we continue, I would like to refer you to the Safe Harbor statement in our earnings press release, which also applies to this call as we will be making forward-looking statements. Please also note that we will discuss non-GAAP measures to date, which are more thoroughly explained in our earnings press release and filings with the SEC.
Joining us today are our Founder and CEO, Mr. Cunjun Ma; COO, Mr. Li Jiang; Co-CFO, Mr. Minghan Xiao; and Co-CFO, Mr. Ron Tam. Mr. Ma will start the call by providing an overview of the company's performance and operational highlights for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023. Mr. Tam will then provide details on the financial results for the period before we open up the call for questions. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Ma.
Ma Cunjun
(interpreted) Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Huize's fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 earnings conference call. In 2023, China's insurance industry continued a positive growth trajectory, marking the second consecutive year of growth, following the industry's significant reforms. In particular, the demand for savings insurance products remained robust, driving a 12.75% growth in total premiums for China's life insurance industry amid the declining RMB interest rates.
The China Insurance Consumer Confidence Index also reflected a resurgence in consumer confidence towards the macroeconomic environment and the insurance industry. Notably, the intention to increase insured insurance coverage has rebounded for three consecutive quarters, surpassing levels seen in the same period of both 2021 and 2022. Navigating through this evolving market trends, Huize has successfully seized the market opportunities in long-term savings products by leveraging our strategic focus on long-term insurance product, diversified operational tactics, product innovation, and customer acquisition capabilities.
We have once again delivered satisfactory results. In 2023, total gross written premiums or GWP facilitated on our platform reached RMB5.8 billion, up 18.2% year over year. Our total revenue increased by 3.3% year over year to RMB12 billion, and we achieved a non-GAAP net profit of RMB72.3 million, exceeding our guidance RMB60 million.
For our first-year premium or FYP facilitated on our platform reached RMB2.6 billion, offset significantly by 42% year over year, and the renewal premiums increased by 4% year over year, reaching RMB3.2 billion. In terms of product mix, the GWP contribution from long-term insurance products in 2023 was 92.3%, representing the fourth consecutive year exceeding 90%.
During the year, we witnessed a rise in demand for savings products and leveraged our diversified product offerings and omnichannel distribution capabilities to capitalize on that market opportunity. In light of that, FYP from our long-term savings products increased by 54.6% year-over-year to RMB1.7 billion. And FYP from our long-term products increased by 19% year-over-year to RMB510 million.
While we maintained high-quality growth in our long-term insurance business, we also provided customized products and the risk management solutions to our corporate clients, which led to a 74% surge in the FYP of our P&C insurance products reaching RMB390 million in 2023.
As of the end of the fourth quarter, our cumulative number of insurance customers exceeded 9.3 million. Among the long-term insurance customers from the fourth quarter, 65.8% was from higher tier cities and their average age was 34.1 years. So 41.8% were repeat purchases from existing customers, which has increased by 8 percentage points year over year.
We also witnessed a substantial increase in the fourth quarter in average ticket size of savings product in terms of FYP, which was approximately RMB59,000, representing a 30% increase year over year. This was primarily driven by our focus on acquiring high-quality customers and upselling existing customers with high LTV potential as well as the success of our Hong Kong business expansion contributing premium international product sales in the fourth quarter. As of the end of December, our cumulative persistence ratios for the long term insurance in the 13th and 25th month remained at industry high levels of more than 95%.
As of the end of the fourth quarter, we have cooperated with 123 insurer partners. Throughout the year, we maintained solid collaborations with leading insurance companies, further enriched our diverse by product mentioned in order to meet the differentiated protection needs from customer, whether they are in search of premium brands or cost-effective products. For example, in November, we partnered with Dajia Annuity Insurance to launch Dajia Hui Xuan, a customized retirement annuity insurance product, adjusting the unique needs of the post 80s and 90s customers by offering elderly care services and the various types of protection options.
In December, we partnered with PICC Life Insurance to launch the Darwin Critical Care No.8 - Advanced. Since its launched in 2018, the Darwin Critical Care series product that provided over 310,000 customers with enhanced protection through a higher limit, broader coverage, and better service quality. In 2023, the GWP contribution from our customized insurance products was [51.6%].
In 2023, FYP facilitated by our independent financial advisers or IFA platform reached RMB350 million, representing a significant increase of 73% from the previous year. The number of high performing IFA (technical difficulty) increased by 106%.
In our direct-to-consumer segment, we launched a series of promotions and marketing initiatives to engage potential and high-value customers, which has greatly reduced customer acquisition cost conversion rate. As we expand our customer base, we continue to remain committed to keeping our engagements with existing customers. In 2023, we served more than 1 million families with over 11 million insurance policies and assisted with 93,000 insurance plans amounting to a total claims settlement of RMB570 million.
Recognizing the growing demand for premium insurance and overseas asset allocation, we took actions rapidly and seized the opportunity in the Hong Kong insurance market, which has allowed us to diversify our revenue streams, bolster operational resilience and in turn, our risk management abilities. During the year, we partnered with China Pacific Life Insurance, Hong Kong, to co-develop the Jin Man Yi Zu multi-currency products.
With the extension of our product portfolio, we have also expanded our Hong Kong insurance brokerage business for aiding a comprehensive suite of high-end insurance services tailored for high-value customers. With the resumption of cross-border travel, we saw a substantial surge in the scale of our MCB business. The revenue contribution from our Hong Kong brokerage business already reached 6% of our total revenue in fourth quarter.
Beyond Hong Kong, we are actively exploring insurance business opportunities in Southeast Asia. Market statistics show that the average insurance penetration rate of Asia's emerging market was 3.6% point percent in 2022 while that for life insurance was only 2.1%. In particular, the insurance penetration rate in Vietnam and Indonesia was at a low level ranging from 1% to 2%.
We believe that the proven success of our business model can be replicated overseas, especially execute for emerging market where the per capita disposable income continues to rise. We see that potential in the insurance market in this region is massive, and we believe we are in a good position to capture this opportunity.
Finally, I am excited to share some of our assessments in the development of AI large language model for insurance applications. We've had cumulatively served over 16 million insurance customers to date, amassing a wealth of data that encompasses not only our user profiles and statistics, but also product details and sales information, leveraging the strength of our dual data pools. Coupled with our industry-leading technology and innovation capabilities, we have launched a suite of tools powered by our AI marketing assistant.
These tools include the annuity calculator and extensive insurance for the common knowledge bank and a intelligent chat box, all of which are widely adopted by our consultants and agents. To provide more color, our annuity calculator is designed to instantly and automatically display annuity payout upon calculation and clearly illustrate product features reducing the time intake for consultants to prepare product proposals and enabling them to quickly adjust users' inquiries. This AI-driven not only increased consultant efficiencies, capacity, and conversion rate, but also improves the overall user experience by precisely pinpointing user needs and reducing wait time.
Looking ahead, Huize is committed to capitalizing other long-term growth opportunities of the insurance industry in China and Asia. We will enhance our ability to customize differentiated products and integrate online and offline product distribution and services in our home market. So we will continue to invest in our market position in Hong Kong and actively pursue opportunities in the emerging markets of Southeast Asia.
Our goal is to identify adjustable growth markets with supportive demographics and to replicate our proven business model, further diversify our revenue streams to more markets, and elevate our brand awareness and recognition on the international stage. We are targeting a double-digit percentage revenue contribution from international markets in 2024.
At the same time, we have been investing in our own proprietary AI large language model and will strive to integrate our AI product throughout the entire insurance service chain to empower our business operations and ecosystem partners, which include insurance carriers, independent agents and distribution channels from the initial insurance product consultation to user engagement, marketing, risk management, customer service, and claims service.
This concludes my prepared remarks for today. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Mr. Ron Tam, and he will provide an overview of our key financial highlights for the fourth quarter.
Ronald Tam
Thank you, Mr. Ma and Harriet. Good evening, everyone, in the Asia time zone and good morning to everyone in New York.
As the macro economy and industry conditions gradually recover, we are very pleased to report that the total GWP facilitated on our platform for the year increased by 18.2% to RMB5.8 billion in 2023. We think this growth is largely driven by our omnichannel distribution platform capabilities, our high-quality customer base, our diverse range of product offerings as well as our maiden contribution of international revenues from our expansion into the Hong Kong market in the second half of 2023.
Our efforts to acquire new customers have also become increasingly efficient with more than [212,000] new customers added to our ecosystem in the fourth quarter. By the end of the year, our total customer count has exceeded 9.3 million.
We are proud to announce that we recorded a non-GAAP net profit of RMB72.3 million for the 2023 fiscal year, surpassing our previously given guidance of RMB60 million. Our fourth-quarter non-GAAP net profit of RMB16.4 million also marked our fifth consecutive quarter of profitability.
Our robust financial results are testament to the effective execution of our key business strategies. To elaborate, first, we have consistently prioritize our strategic focus on long-term insurance products, which have contributed to over 90% of our gross written premium for 17 straight quarter.
Secondly, we have continue to empower the capabilities of insurance agents through our superb distribution network, product innovation, and technological advancements. This has resulted in a significant 73.4% year-over-year increase in premiums generated by our IFA platform reaching RMB354 million in 2023.
Thirdly, we continue to pursue upselling opportunities across a high-quality customer base. In 2023, the repeat purchase ratio for our long-term insurance products climbed by 6.9 percentage points year-over-year to 36.9%, reflecting the deepening loyalty and trust of our customers in our brand. And finally, we continue to optimize our operational efficiency and customer acquisition costs as reflected in the further improvement in our gross margin and expense ratio.
As we look at our operational results, I want to highlight several key achievements that drove our strong performance. One, our first year premiums and renewal premiums increased by 42% and 4% year-over-year, respectively, indicating our ability to attract new customers and also engage with existing ones. Second, our persistency ratio for long-term life and health insurance remain at an industry high level. As of the end of the year, the 13th- and 25th-month persistency ratio stood above 95%.
And third, the average ticket size for long-term savings insurance products, which has become increasingly important as a category for our distribution increased by 31% year over year to over RMB54,000 in 2023, demonstrating our continued success in upselling our existing customers. We've highlighted just a few examples of a high-quality customer profile and our relentless efforts and successes in capitalizing on the lifetime value potential of our customers.
In 2023, we proudly sustained a market-leading position in long-term insurance products in China. The FYP of our long-term health products increased by 19% year over year to approximately RMB500 million, while the FYP of a long-term life and annuity products surged 55% year over year RMB1.7 billion. We will continue to pursue a balanced product mix between long-term health and savings categories to satisfy evolving customer needs and market environment.
In parallel, we have actively diversified our product portfolio to include also customized P&C insurance products. This diversification has also paid off as the FYP from this business grew by 74%. So approximately, RMB400 million in 2023, providing us with new and promising revenue stream diversification.
In addition, our expansion into the Hong Kong market yielded encouraging results with total international revenue contribution from Hong Kong, reaching 6% in the fourth quarter. Throughout the year, we have diligently maintained tight control over our marketing expenses and continued to streamline our operations to improve our profit margins and efficiency.
Our gross margin improved to 37.4% in 2023 from 36.6% in 2022. This improvement reflects the enhanced customer acquisition efficiencies and the increased repeat purchases by existing customers. In 2023, our total operating expenses continued to decrease, falling by 15% year over year. Our operating expense ratio further improved to 33% in 2023 from 40% a year earlier, decreasing by 7 percentage points. We also achieved non-GAAP net margin of 6% for the full year of 2023.
And as of the end of 2023, our financial position remained strong as our combined balance of cash and cash equivalents stood at RMB249 million, which is more than USD30 million. In addition, with our commitment to drive shareholder value, we have continued to buy back shares on the open market under our existing mandate. And as of the end of 2023, we have repurchased an aggregate of approximately 1.5 million ADSs, which reiterates management's confidence in our long-term business model prospects.
As we continue to solidify our market share in China, we are committed to capitalizing on the long-term digitalization opportunities of Asia's insurance industry. A key focus will be to increase our presence in the Hong Kong market, where we plan to expand the sales team and launch more customized products to capitalize on the robust MCV demand and also local insurance demand of high-value customers.
We also proactively identify addressable gold markets with supportive demographics in Southeast Asia and largely untapped market potential to replicate our proven business model in China and further diversify our revenue stream to more markets and elevate our brand awareness and recognition on the international markets. We have set the target to achieve a double-digit revenue contribution from international markets by 2024. And this goal reflects our confidence in the scalability and replicability of our business model itself.
Moving forward, we'll continue to leverage our deep customer insights and our own proprietary AI products to enhance our product innovation and upselling capabilities. We'll also further strengthen the integration of our online-to-offline ecosystem to enhance customer acquisition and engagement capabilities of our insurance agents by providing them with the tools and support in an increasingly competitive landscape. As we recognize the importance of resource allocation across the businesses, we will maintain a laser sharp focus on driving for improvements in operating efficiency with the aim to enhance our overall capabilities.
And in summary, considering a robust AI-powered product innovation capabilities, our extensive online-to-offline distribution ecosystem, the empowerment of our insurance agents and IFA partners and a proactive overseas expansion efforts, we are continuing to be optimistic about the outlook for 2024.
We are now targeting a non-GAAP net profit of [RMB60 million] for 2024, with continued investments in new markets and AI. We are confident that our strategies will solidify our position as a leading insurance technology platform in Asia, connecting consumers, insurance carriers, and distribution partners digitally and efficiently through our data-driven and AI-powered solutions.
And with that, we would now open up the call to questions. Thank you very much. And over to you, operator.
Question and Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions)
[Amy Chen, Citi].
Amy Chen
Hi. First of all, I want to congratulate management on another profitable quarter. And then I have two question. The first question is on the rationalization of compensation paid to the brokerage channel, which is called [Bao Xing Huoyi] in Chinese. And I'm wondering how would this impact our brokerage income in terms of -- for example, for annuity products or say, for CI products, how would this impact our first-year commissions and the renewal commissions?
And the second question would be on customer demand. Going into 2024, how has the product mix shift so far, and what is our most mainstream or most popular products at the moment? Thank you.
Ronald Tam
Thank you, Amy. So I got two questions from you. The first one on Bao Xing Huoyi impact on the business. So we know that this is a very important topic among investors' minds right now. And so far, I think that what we've seen -- which has happened already for bank insurance channels is that commission rates have generally been reduced by around 3% to 50% in that area.
For the brokerage and agency channels, of course, the actual regulation have not come out officially, in effective yet. But we do expect that this will come probably in the next few months, maybe as early as April. So what we envisage is that probably there will be a somewhat similar kind of impact on the brokerage and agency channels as we have seen in bank assurance channels in terms of commission rate impacts, generally speaking.
And I think the impact on the offline so-called savings products will be more marked or more adversely impacted versus some of the online-only products. So that's what we see as the potential market impact on that question.
On your second question about customer demand and product mix shifts, I think we have also continued to see strong and sustained momentum in the long-term savings category or annuities. This has still been the most popular or most in-demand product among Chinese consumers due to the declining rate environment and probably the lack of attractive alternative investment alternatives in the China market right now with what we've seen in the real estate market and also underperforming equities market.
So the long-term savings products offered by insurance companies still represents a very viable and attractive investment product or wealth allocation product for general Chinese consumer. So we see that for the rest of this year -- at least for the first quarter, we are still seeing very strong demand for savings products. And in particular, we have been distributing -- participating long-term savings products, and we are probably one of the leading online platforms to distribute that hopefully, the most popular participating right now of the bond market which is from generally China. So we are probably one of the leading platforms distributing this product in the China market.
So I think this is probably the -- this is going to be the mainstream product for the rest of the year. And we will continue to work hard to co-develop customized products in this category with some of the larger brand names, which we hopefully will be able to launch as early as April next month. So we will be looking to cooperate with one of the top brands in the China market for a customized -- for its exclusive long-term participating savings product. So those will be the answer to your questions, Amy.
Amy Chen
That is very clear. Thank you, Ron.
Operator
Thank you. CoCo Gong, Morgan Stanley.
CoCo Gong
Thank you very much, and congratulations on the very good results. I only have one question that's a little bit specific. Ron, you talked a lot about the savings products demand. And obviously, the protection is still on investors' mind, although the demand seems to be still kind of weak right now and especially in China.
So I want to understand since we can see a lot of data on this, do we see marginal improvement on critical illness like the long-term health insurance product? Specifically, are we seeing more customers -- new customers buying this insurance product? Or are you just seeing more existing customers buying more coverage? And do we see any other potential signs of marginal improvement in a specific product type? Thank you.
Ronald Tam
Right. Thank you, CoCo. So question on customers' or consumers' demand on long-term health products, particularly in the critical illness type of products. I think we do see continued -- or at least from our internal data, I mean, obviously, the savings category is what people want these days. And especially in the current macro environment, I think generally a Chinese consumers have a relatively stringent budgets to allocate the money.
So long-term savings or whole-life products are particularly participating products these days have drawn a lot of the customers focus and budget. And so I think that this is why we still continue to see a relatively lukewarm growth in the long-term health categories, for example, critical illness, which has continue to be recovering slowly.
We do see customers -- existing customers and new customers buying these products through our platform. It's not like the demand is not there. It's just that with the relative attention more towards savings products generally in the market -- and especially is a function of some intermediaries like ourselves, platforms like ourselves and our competitors and also generally insurance agents in the overall market, mainly pushing the distribution and sales of savings products, which has resulted in such a market phenomenon.
So what we'll do is we will continue to innovate on the health products. So we mentioned that we have just launched our Darwin No.8, which is a new version of our long-term successful brand IP in this category. And this time, we actually are now working with PICC, which Mr. Ma mentioned earlier in the call. We are working now with large insurers on these customized products -- so hopefully, create more attention among our customer set and to drive more sales in these categories.
CoCo Gong
Thank you very much. That's very clear. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. [Yuyu Zhang, CICC].
Yuyu Zhang
(technical difficulty) management, congrats on your good result. Yuyu Zhang from CICC. And I have one question here, and my question is for the To-A segment. Could you give us some more color on how is it going so far? And we've noticed that recently Insurance Association of China has asked for industries advice about agent classification. So if it increments, I think it may have some effect on -- to a business. So could you share some more views on that? Thank you.
Ronald Tam
Right. Thanks. And so we touched on the To-A business earlier in the opening remarks. I think this business line has continued to be very strong, at least in 2023. It is contributing almost 20% of our overall premium facilitated, and we continue to see strong growth in this business line.
So specifically, I think there's a number that I can share here. So FYP facilitated by the IFA platform, which is the To-A platform was RMB350 million last year, which is similar to -- which we saw year-over-year increase of 73%. I think the most important thing is more and more independent agents or IFAs are now coming to our partners because they find the three things that very much our competitive strengths.
Firstly, we have a very extensive product matrix from simple P&C products to the extensive life and health products that we have, in particular the customized exclusive feature products that we co-developed with our insurance carriers. So I think that's a big draw to these independent agents to become associated with us as a partner.
And secondly, I think obviously, because of our scale advantage, we earn top commission rates with both of the insurance carriers and thereby, these agents by now plugging into our platform will be able to enjoy the revenue pick-up versus maybe partnering with another platform or as an agent with inside an agency. So I guess these are the things that are helping us attract more and more agents to come.
And I think finally, most importantly, we have the whole suite of digital tools that we have been mentioning across our opening remarks, which really helps digitalizing the customer journey for these agents and also help them manage customers very efficiently with our digital AI tools. And this I think then is quite a unique proposition in the Chinese market, at least.
So just to touch upon the IFA business model, I think what we're looking to launch is, we want to replicate this into the rest of Asia. So I think we'll be starting out with Hong Kong and also going into other parts of Southeast Asia. I think that's something that we think will be a very good value proposition to those local markets as well. So yeah, I think in short, it's performing very well, and it will continue to be -- it will be increasingly important as a revenue stream and business network.
And your second part of the question is regarding the I believe is the [Fen Jie Fen Le]. I think the [Italians expenditure]. So the agent -- for the agent exams and the differentiation of different gradings. So what we understand is right now days four grades for agents, grade one to grade four. So for grade one, you can sell all the complicated products, life and health savings, whatnot, and grade four, you only sell very simple products like protection or P&C.
What we think that is for most of the our agent partners that we have on now To-A business or IFA platform, most of these are relatively experienced agents that has been -- who have been working in the industry for over five years on average. So this regulatory impact will be minimal because I think most of these experienced agents have already qualified or can qualify for the higher tiers of the classifications, and it will not have a limiting impact on what they can sell or distribute to the customers.
And I think the same can be applied to our in-house consultants and agents in the Huize platform. And most of our high-performing agents can qualify under these new regulations. And we think that the draft paper has been out, but the effective date will likely to be next year.
Operator
Thank you. At this point, we have no further questions. So I would like to hand the conference back to Harriet for closing remarks.
Harriet Hu
Thank you, operator. So on behalf of Huize's management team, we would like to thank you for your participation in today's call. And if you require further information, please feel free to reach out to Huize's IR team. And thank you again for joining us today. This concludes the call.
Ronald Tam
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
