Earnings Labs

AIFU Inc. (AIFU)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Tue, May 23, 2017

$1.37

+7.87%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by for Fanhua's first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please follow the instructions given at that time if you would like to ask a question. For your information, this conference call is now being broadcasted live over the Internet. Webcast replay will be available within three hours after the conference is finished. Please visit Fanhua's IR website at ir.fanhuaholdings.com, under the Events & Webcasts section. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's conference call, Ms. Oasis Qiu, Fanhua's Investor Relations Officer. Thank you.

Oasis Qiu

Management

Good morning. Welcome to our first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. The earnings results were released earlier today and are available on our IR website as well as on Newswire. Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The accuracy of these statements may be impacted by a number of business risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. Such risks and uncertainties include but not limited to those outlined in our filings with the SEC, including our registration statement on Form 20-F. We do not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information except as required under applicable law. Joining us today are our Chief Executive Officer Mr. Chunlin Wang and Chief Financial Officer Mr. Peng Ge. Mr. Wang will walk you through our financial results in the first quarter 2017. He and Mr. Ge will then take your questions after the prepared remarks. Now I will turn the call over to Mr. Wang.

Chunlin Wang

Management

Good morning. Welcome to Fanhua's first quarter 2017 financial results conference call. Today I will introduce our first quarter 2017 financial results first and then Mr. Ge and I will take your questions. Let me start by a brief overview of our financial performance in the first quarter 2017. In the first quarter of 2017, the Chinese insurance industry maintained stable and fast development, with total insurance premiums reaching RMB1.6 trillion, representing a year-over-year growth of 32.4%, among which the P&C insurance and life insurance premiums grew 11.5% and 37.0%, respectively. And benefiting from the industry growth and with firm implementation of the Company's strategic plans, our financial results for the first quarter 2017 far exceeded our expectations. Our total revenues grew 61.6% to RMB1.4 billion and operating income hit RMB63.2 million. Among all the highlights in the first quarter 2017, our life insurance business extended its streak of substantial growth and accounted for significantly higher proportion in our total business mix. In the first quarter 2017, revenues from our life insurance business were up 283.5% to RMB610 million, accounting for 41.8% of our total revenues compared with 17.6% in the corresponding period last year. The rapid growth of life insurance business was mainly attributable to our thriving near- term life insurance business. In the first quarter 2017, premiums generated by near-term life insurance grew 292.2% to RMB741 million. Meanwhile, renewal of term life insurance business also contributed RMB330 million insurance premiums, which was 50.4% higher than the corresponding period last year. Thirteen-month persistency ratio for our life insurance business kept up with the level of top insurance companies in China and maintained over 91% in the first quarter of 2017. Gross profit for our life insurance business was RMB178 million in the first quarter 2017, accounting for 71.4% of…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Hsieh Yen from CICC. Please go ahead.

Hsieh Yen

Analyst

This is the question from Hsieh Yen from CICC. Congratulations on the good results. And he has two questions. Firstly, the Company has recorded rapid growth in the term life insurance premium in the first quarter on the life side. And the Company mentioned that the major reason was because of the industry growth as well as the successful implementation of the Company's cross selling strategy. He is wondering what the strategy is about more specifically. And then secondly, the Company recorded a decline of 52% year-over-year in selling expenses, mainly due to the consolidation of marketing expenses. He's wondering, what's the reason that we canceled these marketing expenses? And will the consolidation of marketing expenses resulted and impacted the growth in number of sales agents and the growth of our insurance agency business?

Chunlin Wang

Management

With regard to your first question on cross selling strategies, the Company has been operating in the insurance intermediary sector for 19 years, and over the past decades we have built our key competence with a wide range of financial products and service offerings as well as leading technologies. And one of our key competitiveness, which is entrepreneurship programs that we offer to sales agents, which targets to attract sales agents, particularly the teams of sales agents, to run their own business under CNinsurance platforms with our back-office support and wide range of product offerings. And when we attract these sales agents to join CNinsure, we will basically enhance training, provide more training to them to improve their sales skills and sales capabilities. In 2017 we have earmarked our budget, 2% of the total budget, as the training cost, in order to help them to generate more -- stronger selling capability. And regarding to your second question, on the marketing expenses. When we implemented the market programs in 2016 based on the results, actually we believe that the results have proved that this marketing strategy has been quite effective in helping us attracting more sales agents to join CNinsure and boosting the development of our business. In 2017 we're going to continue with this kind of strategy. But the costs or the expenses will be accounted as commission costs. And that's why you can see that our gross margin on the P&C side was only 7.3% in the first quarter, and that's because the expenses was accounted as commission costs in the first quarter. And we believe that this -- the increase in the rate of commissions paid to sales agents will be worthwhile and help -- it will be worthwhile for us to further develop our business. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of [Arthur Haul] (ph) from [Indiscernible] Incorporated.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yes, thank you for taking the question. I noticed that you increased your sales agents pretty dramatically in the first quarter, about 50,000 agents, 21% increase over the end of the year. And yet the revenues actually declined about 4.4%. This is unusual in comparison to past quarters and I wonder if you could comment on this aspect of productivity for your sales agents.

Chunlin Wang

Management

I think it's natural that, as a result of rapid growth in sales agents, the per capita productivity may decline at the very beginning. And right now our focus is to further increase the number of sales agents to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the industry, particularly the trend of migration of sales agents from insurance company into the independent intermediary sector. When we attract a sales agent to join CNinsure, we're definitely going to provide them better training to help them to improve their sales skills and improve their productivity in the future. So right now the lower productivity per capita productivity, actually indicates that we still have a lot of room to improve in terms of our sales productivity and also further room for the Company to grow our business.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Thank you. And also, could you update your forecast of operating income? It was 180 million at the end of the year and now you already forecast 133 million for the first half. I just wondered if you could update that forecast for the year, annual income, operating income.

Chunlin Wang

Management

The first quarter result did perform much better than we have originally expected, while -- and as for whether or not we're going to revise our guidance, I think we may have more visibility after we report our second quarter results, and then we will decide whether or not to revise upwards the guidance.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instruction] There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the call back to Oasis. Please continue.

Oasis Qiu

Management

Thank you for participating in our conference call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you.