Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for your time. It is always a privilege for me to present Discovery's results. This presentation today is about our results for the six months to the end of 31 December 2021. We're gonna follow a similar format. I will present the results. I'm joined with our CFO, Deon Viljoen, and our entire executive team is on the call. I'll take questions after the presentation. It's a very complex and exciting time. I think the results must be seen in that context. Right up front, I do want to thank our 13,439 people that make up Discovery. I really do.
These are difficult times, and our people have worked hard. What you see in these results, although they're financial, is a manifestation of the incredible work, the incredible talent. I really want to express our appreciation to them for what they've done. Let me start by just making the point that we presented our results, we announced our results through a SENS announcement. Just at the top line, you can see I think the numbers are robust. Core new business up 6%. Normalized operating profit up 8%. Gearing effect on headline earnings up 78%, and normalized headline earnings in our operations up 26%, half year on half year.
I wanted to make the point that you can see that we've really tried our best to simplify the structure of Discovery operationally in terms of governance into three distinct units. Discovery in South Africa, Vitality in the U.K., and Vitality Global that operates as a platform across the world. I think the process has been a very good one.
To contextualize, there's been a very strong focus on discipline, on governance, on depth of talent, on depth of the team, and the ability to really operate in these three distinct areas. Discovery in South Africa is the composite I think you, if you follow us, would know quite well. Health, et cetera, all the way to Discovery Bank. Vitality in the U.K. is a similar kind of composite structure.
The Vitality Global, very importantly, is made up of two distinct business units. One is insurance partner markets that operates with global insurers across the world using the Vitality model, and its fundamental revenue flow is fee revenue around using the Vitality model and attaching it and penetrating the products of our insurers, our insurance partners. The second is Vitality Health International.
This was in its formative phase. It is now a very well-structured unit and really manifests in equity stakes in large opportunities. Ping An Health obviously has been part of the group for a long time. But Amplify Health, that we just rolled out during this period and more will follow. It's a very important, exciting piece of Vitality Global.
Let me just make the point as well, that it is a complex period. We've been in a pandemic. The world is in a very complex time. Just this morning, we've seen the invasion of Ukraine. These are not simple times at all. I have to say, and I hope it's kind of obvious, that I think oftentimes strategy is about sequential execution in a linear fashion.
I think in difficult, complex, ambiguous times where you have a pandemic, you have fluctuating rates of interest, of exchange rates, and then inflation coming up, and receding globalization, and a war that will certainly affect the global environment quite considerably, you do have to think about strategy in a kind of parallel way, in a more ambiguous way.
I think our focus, and I wanted to make the point, has been on three issues concurrently. The first, of course, is navigating COVID and the environment. The second is concurrently driving for growth, a deep conviction in our business model and its applicability both in our local markets but globally, and not losing sight of the considerable opportunity.
There's investing strongly in driving for growth, but at the same time, a very strong focus on robust operating performance, on capital strength, and liquidity strength, and making sure we can do all three of these concurrently. It has been a complex time, but I hope you'll see we're at the half year phase, so the numbers will play out over the year.
I think just through the numbers, I'm hoping you can see the quality of the execution and the quality of what I think has been probably for us one of the most important phases in our evolution. I think a very, very strong phase, not just in terms of numbers, but I think in terms of our ability to really grow going forward.
Let me go through a number of issues. I thought at the outset, just make the point about our navigating of COVID. I mean, just bear in mind, this is a massive issue. You will know this well, so I hope I'm not patronizing. This is a massive issue for us. It's about the tragedy of COVID. It's about vaccination. It's about hospitalization. It's about hard working.
It's an amalgam of things. You know, at the outset of the COVID pandemic, we tried our best to interpret, you know, what effect this would have on new business, on persistency, on morbidity, on health claims, on life claims. All of that I think has somehow ultimately from a financial perspective boiled down to mortality claims in South Africa.
When you look at the group's financials, that is the fundamental manifestation because COVID kind of hit South Africa certainly the Delta wave. The third wave hit South Africa at a time when people were largely unvaccinated. The fundamental impact of COVID has been on mortality in South Africa.
My slides here look narrow on the South African life business, but I think when you look at the financials and the results in the context of COVID, it is about South African mortality. If you look at the chart that we're showing, you can see the scale of what has happened. On the top of the chart on the left-hand side shows you the life claims paid out by Discovery Life per variant, Beta, Delta, and Omicron. I think the crucial point to make is while we kind of hopefully see COVID receding in some way, you can see in the period under review, the actual financials, the IFRS effect of COVID was most marked in this last six months.
From an IFRS perspective, Discovery Life paid out on a gross basis just under ZAR 3.4 billion of life claims. Obviously, that's a number. Underlying that number is a tragedy of deaths, but you can see the scale of what has happened. I think maybe start at the end in mind. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, we set up considerable provisions.
The provisions actually proved to be adequate. We've got left just over ZAR 465 million of provisions. Just to make the point, we don't intend setting up additional provisions. Our position now is we are hoping that those provisions are satisfactory. It's based on the fact that we are hoping that COVID over time will recede, and hopefully it becomes more benign.
Now, a few points to make about that because I think the central question is: Where is it heading? We don't know. Will there be a fifth wave? How severe will it be? We don't know. A few points to be made. It's a very, very interesting analysis that if you look at the kind of infection rate on the slide, you can see amazingly that the kind of delta, the time between the peaks of each wave, Beta to Delta to Omicron, has been amazingly consistent at about 170 days or thereabout. It is quite remarkable. But the waves have become more infectious but less severe. That is what we've seen.
On the right-hand side of the chart, from our data, you can see the kind of case fatality rate coming down over time. There is kind of some kind of pattern around, you know, the onset of the waves, and I think our team have predicted them quite well using data. You can see that they are more infectious, but more benign.
I guess the central question. Will that continue? I think the broad view is that that's likely to continue. There's a strong view and a strong hope, of course, amongst all of us that future waves are less severe, are not as infectious, and hopefully are through the worst. That's a view that we hold. We hope for, but we must plan for the worst.
We must hope for the best and plan for the worst. Therefore, we are very careful about our capital position, our liquidity position. Our view also is based on a few important issues. Firstly, there is some risk. This is a complicated slide, but it is a fascinating issue. It turns out that the flu virus mutates in a ladder-like way, from one to the other. COVID is different.
You see on the right-hand side of the chart, the variants actually tend to evolve or emerge in parallel, as I understand. Omicron is not related to Beta, is not related to Delta. These things emerge in parallel. Therefore there's no relationship and no absolute necessity that if the previous one was benign, the next one should be more benign.
I guess over time that could happen when the virus ultimately mutates to the point where it can't better itself. We don't know that for sure. There is certainly some risk that there is a wave coming. That wave could be more severe than Omicron. There's a strong hope and a general sense that that's not likely the case.
There is a risk of that. Mitigating that, of course, is a number of things. I think one of the most important, of course, is at this stage, the power of the vaccine. We've seen the data, and we have it from the vaccine. The vaccine reduces hospitalization risk. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, up to 90% if you have three Pfizer doses.
Critically, from a public health perspective, it makes you less infectious. That lowers the risk of transmission substantially. From the data I've seen, actually the period of infectiousness actually goes down when you're vaccinated. Amazingly, overall, the mortality risk is dramatically lower. You can see on the right-hand side of the screen the pie chart of deaths that we've seen at Discovery Life, and they've been significant.
The number of deaths of vaccinated people is tiny. It's that little sliver in the blue on the pie. The massive majority of all deaths we've seen, probably 98% of them or so, are from people that are unvaccinated. The vaccine works, and that's an important issue in our thinking going forward.
The second point is that unfortunately, we've had massive levels of infection in South Africa. As you've seen from our previous presentations, we estimate that 70%-80% of people have immunity from being infected before, and you can see that in the chart. That immunity tends to wane over time.
If you overlay on that on the right-hand side of the chart, although at this stage, still fairly low levels of vaccination in the country, it's one of the challenges we have. When you bring the vaccination into the immunity, you get a pretty robust set of defenses against a future wave. On the back of all of that, our view tends to be that we think our book is resilient against a future wave.
You can see on the left-hand side our own case fatality rates that we've seen in the yellow on the fourth wave are tiny compared to the others. In the middle of the chart, you can see the high levels of vaccination we've managed to achieve. Whether it's the health book, the life book, the group life book, in the areas of high risk, we're typically 70% to 80% vaccinated.
That's probably understated. Coming back to the kind of conclusion I started with, the provisions we set up were satisfactory. As you can see, we've used up ZAR 1.8 billion or so of the ZAR 2.3 billion. We're left with just under half a billion of provision. We're gonna leave that where it is.
Our view is that should prove to be sufficient for a wave coming forward. At the end of the day, if there's a significant wave, it will create earnings volatility. From a capital perspective, liquidity perspective, and I hope you'll see that later, we are strongly capitalized and highly liquid, and we remain in that position. Enough on COVID.
Just again, to make the point, it's much more than financial results. I just wanted to give you the perspective of where we sit. Let me turn to the financial results. The table you see here is what we actually put out. Some, I think many people watching will have seen this. I'll call out some issues too. Make the point, I think we're pleased with the overall result.
We expected to be more flat at this half year just based on timing. The operating profit up 8% is actually ahead of our expectation. We're very pleased with that. Core new business up 6%. You can see the build up or the breakdown of that across the table. Discovery Health had an excellent period despite its massive impact on COVID and work done. From a financial perspective, robust performance.
As you can see, massive growth in new business. Discovery Life had a very strong performance over the period. The reinsurance structures, liquidity all have proved to be robust, and the provisions against COVID. Strong new business growth, 9% up in I think a fairly difficult market. Earnings up only 1%, but I will take you through that later.
Discovery Life has paid out ZAR six billion of claims, and the effect of that on the asset base of the company is important to understand. In effect, the return on those assets we would have got is lost because they've been paid out in claims. It does have a mitigating effect on the growth in earnings, certainly in this year, despite a very good performance.
Discovery Invest, excellent performance all round. You can see robust profit growth and new business. The one difficult business we had during the period was Discovery Insure. The business is excellent. The quality is excellent. We had a kind of blip up in the loss ratio driven by a number of factors, weather, power surges.
Interesting, motor car parts probably a factor of, and I'll show you some data on that a bit later, or shipping costs and the various issues we've seen in the supply chain is something that has created a bloating of the loss ratio. It's something we need to manage and should have managed. We'll get on top of that, and I'll take you through that later. Turning to the U.K., the performance in the U.K. has been nothing short of exceptional. It really has been a tour de force across virtually every single metric. VitalityHealth growing profit by 39%. Strong new business growth. VitalityLife, the 10-point plan we put in place two periods ago has proven to be excellent.
I think every single issue of that has played out. New business is down slightly, but it's been a very strong focus on quality of new business. Vitality Group has performed well. You can see a 2% reduction, but there was a massive foreign gain in the previous period. To put that into context, and I'll show you a bit later how those progressed over the years. Ping An Health had a very strong profit performance.
I think the Ping An Health story is about fundamentally scale and quality. There's been a fundamental change in the distribution strategy of Ping An Life that I'll touch on later. You can see a reduction in new business by 21%. We spent on the bank about ZAR 498 million.
That's ahead of plan. It's better than planned. The bank has been a standout performer, and I'll show you that later across virtually every single metric. The acquisition of clients, the quality of everything we're doing, I think, to the banks team has been exceptional. We continue to invest in new businesses, and we are pushing hard here and proud of it. I need to say that there's a focus on Amplify Health, one of the biggest things I think Discovery has ever done. There's a focus on Vitality ONE, on the tech that underpins the platform. There's a lot going on. Certainly in this period, we're pushing very, very hard.
There's a strong conviction between ourselves and many of our shareholders that this is a time that we should be pushing hard to globalize the model, and I think we are. Enough said on the detail. I hope I haven't said too much again. I'll go through in detail more. I hope I haven't given away all the issues.
Let me just give you a sense of some of the points. We wanted to give you a sense of the progression, you know, through COVID of new business operating profit. I think the growth tends to be strong. I do think if COVID recedes somewhat, and there isn't a very severe fifth wave, our sense is that we're in a strong growth phase now, and I think that's a good thing.
There are real big things we've been building and working hard on over the last number of years that are coming to fruition. I think that's important. The other point to say, and it's a busy slide, and I'm sorry for that. Just wanted to give you a sense of the consistency of performance across all of our businesses.
You can see beside Discovery Insure, typically this half has been kind of a return to growth. You can't really see the effect of COVID because largely the provisions and the impact of COVID happen in the next six-month period. Typically, you can see, I think, the growth and the quality in terms of new business operating profit across the business has been very strong.
One of the important points to make is there's been a very strong focus on investing in new businesses. There's a lot of big things that we're doing. Discovery Bank, obviously Amplify Health across Asia. A focus on building up businesses in Investec umbrella funds. A lot of stuff that's adjacencies to the stuff that we're doing. I think that's natural. There's really big things in terms of what we're trying to achieve. You can see on the left-hand side at the top of the chart, fully 50% of the total spend on new businesses is in the bank. A further 20% is in Vitality Global. I would argue those are two areas that we are very, very happy to be investing in.
The others, I think are not out of line and very much I think an organization should be doing as we try and grow organically in the existing markets. You can see we spent about 17%, so I hope the slide is clear. On the bottom left-hand side of the chart showing the total group operating profit growth, and in that little purple circle just illustrating the spend on new business.
You can see the spend on new business has come down to about 17% from a peak of 21%. Despite the spend, the operating profit has grown by 8%. I think it's important, and more and more we are thinking as we've broken the group down into three big business units, that the new business spend must be managed inside each of these business units.
They should be seen in the context of the growth of each of these units. You've seen Discovery South Africa, we spend about 16% on new business, predominantly Discovery Bank. Despite that, I think the growth is quite satisfactory. As the bank turns and the bank gets traction, the growth should really accelerate. In the case of the U.K., there's a fairly small spend, 8% on new businesses, but there is potential.
We think an early entry into motor insurance that we're excited about. Then critically, you can see the real spend proportionalities in Vitality Global. You can see we spend 52% of operating profit, predominantly on Amplify Health, VitalityOne, the technology platform. I think that spend is entirely justified.
We really need to globalize and build the capability of the model. I'm trying to give a sense of kind of focusing on both ends, both on a conservative approach to managing a very complicated environment, but at the same time, we are doing big things, be it Ping An, be it Amplify Health, Discovery Bank, et cetera.
That could be disproportionate to the group's future going forward. I think to contextualize then, I guess the duality of trying to do both be prudent but grow at the same time. I think you see that coming together in the capital plan. Our liquidity and strength of our capital base on the left-hand side. All of our regulated entities are very well capitalized, as you can see.
FLR has in fact come down quite strongly over the period. We continue to focus very hard on reducing the financial leverage of the group. We've said that we're staying true to that. Despite all of the different dynamics in the building and the new businesses and claims, you can see that the group is highly liquid, and we have sufficient liquidity buffer at the center.
We've kept this focus on ZAR 1 billion to ZAR 2 billion at the center. We remain in that range. The group is strongly capitalized and highly liquid. I must make the point that at the previous announcement, we made it clear that Ping An Health had a capital call to fund future growth. Given the scale of Ping An Health, our share of that was ZAR 1.5 billion.
We made it clear at that point in time we intended to raise capital to do that. These numbers here include the payment of that. We've invested the money into Ping An Health. It's awaiting regulatory approval, but it's being paid through the structure. The FLR and all of these numbers that I'm showing you are after the payment of that capital. We are unequivocal that Ping An Health capital raise was outside of our plan that we'd set out, and therefore, we will raise capital, and we'll do that via VCP, a vendor consideration placement. Dion, if I got that term right. We'll do it via VCP and we're waiting to do that as soon as we get regulatory approval.
You can see, I think, the strength of the group, even despite the fact we've paid that outside of our plan, but we will proceed and make sure that we raise capital in that regard. Let me talk finally to the embedded value. I think the embedded value shows, I think, the quality of how the group has progressed from period to period.
You can see on an annualized basis, grew by 22.7%. I think that's a bit flat because of the economic effect of interest rates lowering in South Africa. I think the operational EV growing by about 17% on an annualized basis is very strong. Made up of, I think, good quality new business, positive experience variances, and of course, the unwind of the discount rate.
You can see how the embedded value has progressed from period to period. I hope that is clear. Just to reconcile finally the operating profit down to the headline earnings. I hope this stuff is clear. I've just been through the operating profits growing by 8% period to period. There are two big swings to mention.
One is interest rates in South Africa went down during this period, but went up in the previous period. You get a massive positively geared effect on the bottom line, as you can see. The second point is exchange rate did the opposite. It weakened during this period, but strengthened in the previous period, also creating a very positive geared effect.
When you bring those two to account, you find profit before tax went up 80%, so below the line from 8% up to 80%. With various adjustments after tax headline earnings up 78%. To normalize that, we take out the effect of interest rate movements, as followers will know, and that brings us down to 26% increase in normalized headline earnings. To make the point, we will still maintain our policy of not paying a dividend. The environment remains uncertain and COVID is not over yet, so we are focused very carefully on our position on that. Let me move forward and try and give you a sense of strategy and how we are thinking about things.
I thought just important to talk about our Vitality shared value model, our business model. We have deeper and deeper conviction about its potential. At every presentation, we try our best to illustrate that we see in the world a real evolution of the nature of understanding of risk. It's behavioral, the power of technology, and of course, the issue of purpose and social responsibility. All of these factors have accelerated so dramatically during the COVID period and likely to continue to accelerate in the world, and I think we're well placed .
I mean, simply put, I think our hypothesis, if we can achieve the following, an organization that understands the standard risk factors, but understands the behavioral risk factors as well, has the ability to understand causality, correlations, and price them into our products.
Secondly, the ability through technology, through brilliant customer journeys that are simple with digital functionality, to get engagement with our clients, to get behavior change, and to personalize it in a very, very granular way. If we achieve that in a way that we can make people healthier, demonstrate it to society, be good for society and good for the planet, that is what we seek to do. I do believe that with our business model as we set it out, we have that potential. The manifestation is the inverted T on the bottom of the chart, where effectively our Vitality model, be it health, money or drive, sits in the institutional capability, be it a life insurer, health insurer, bank is kind of the manifestation of that vision.
We are continuing to invest in all areas of the Vitality behavioral model. I wanted to mention to you the focus and the progress we are trying to make in issues of life and health insurance, and particularly when it comes to sickness, and to death. There are layers that I think have been built that are, I think, exceptionally strong.
The data layer, the technology layer, the ability to predict illness, the prediction layer, the engagement intervention layer, and then layering on the health technologies and the product layer that really brings it into the market. Each of these layers are pieces of the Vitality model are getting considerable investment.
I think the exciting thing is that the Vitality kind of proposition to the customer is know your health, improve your health, get rewarded. That's the simple kind of focus of how the program works. If you underpin that, if you actually look under that, there's considerable complexity in a whole world where we want to be global leaders in. Knowing your health is about the ability for us to predict illness, to understand at a granular level what are the exact risk factors for an individual, knowing everything about them, the data about them. The second way of improving your health is about getting people engaged, understanding behavioral science, understanding how best to do that. The third, of course, getting rewarded is shared value, actually understanding the correlations and how we share that value as it's created by behavior change.
We need to drill down in each of these, and I would argue that I do believe we're global leaders in each of these, but we need to get precision that we can predict illness, we can understand risk factors, we can get behavior change, we can share the value. I think each of those three pieces has considerable global application.
During this period, a lot of work was done by our team, and it's being used globally by our team in this concept of Healthy Futures. This was work done together with IHME, with others, with other researchers across the world, of really a tool that we call Healthy Futures that allows based on individual risk factors to actually work out what is a lifespan, a proper comprehensive expectation of life. Then critically, what is the health span?
How many healthy years is the individual likely to live? The difference between the two are the risk factors. You know, what makes up those risk factors? Diabetes, other disease, et cetera, et cetera. Understand in a very precise form what those are. Then the ability to reach in on the right-hand side and decide what are the primary behaviors that will arrest that and make lifespan and health span both longer.
We developed, I think, a very powerful prediction layer with data. We worked with RAND Europe. We worked with IHME's Global Burden of Disease study, with the ability to do this at a granular level in different countries. Then working hard on this idea of resonance, understanding from behavioral science how you get people to actually respond to this.
The one I think fantastic output out of this is a hugely complicated data point, but it's simple to the individual. You know, what's your lifespan? What's your healthspan? The critical thing we're getting to is what's the number one thing you should do? What's the next best action? That's kind of the behavioral trigger we're trying to get to. I think the data is very exciting. Here's an example. I think it's a male, 57. I think they modeled it on me in some way. I hope I don't have many of these risk factors. But it kind of talks to an ex-smoker doing some physical activity, not eating particularly healthy, hypertensive, not adhering to his medication.
What you see on the top right-hand side of the chart is we expect the lifespan of this individual to be 21.1 years, but the healthy years are only 16.2, and you can see a bunch of risk factors, as you can see, in the chart. Twenty-three percent of the remaining life is lived in bad health. Of course, it's not actual years, it's probabilistic years, but that's how it works. I think the exciting thing about the data is that lifespan and healthspan are elastic. It's never, ever too late.
If you moderate behavior, what our data shows is this individual, just through a few activities, eating better, particularly being more physically active and taking his medication as he should. You can see life span goes from 29 years to 27 years, and health span amazingly goes up by, I think it's 30% or eight. I should know the numbers, but 16 years to 22 years, as you can see. It's highly elastic, which means we can affect life span and health span. The critical thing that more than half of that change or close to half of that change comes from one activity, physical activity. This idea of next best action is so powerful in that context. We're doing a lot of work on our behavioral science in the U.K.
They are leading the group in a sense, together with the U.S. around this idea of next best action that really takes all of the data, all of the understanding, and says to the individual through a recommendation engine on the face of the mobile, "This is the next best thing you should do." It creates a world of connectivity to different issues to allow them to do that. We are working hard on getting the model to a position where we hope we can put it into a life and health insurance book or into a partner or whatever, and you get real engagement and real improvement in mortality. These for us are, I think, very, very exciting times to kind of talk to the execution of the strategy to an extent going forward.
Let me talk now to the three distinct areas, Discovery South Africa, Vitality UK, and then Vitality Global. Give you some sense of how they progressed and give you some sense of the strategy. I'll begin with Discovery in South Africa and talk firstly to Discovery Bank. I have to say to you that I think the performance of Discovery Bank over the six months period has been the standout performance together with the U.K. It's been absolutely remarkable. It's important to make the point that we are not trying to build a neobank that is as skinny and across millions and millions of people. This is a focused full service bank. It's a full service bank that meets the needs of its clients but creates revenue in the flow.
It's also a shared value banking model, that we're trying to get the right kind of behaviors, the right kind of correlations. Finally, it's a digital bank. It is digital on the face of the mobile with considerable functionality, and our view there is giving functionality, but at the same time getting the economic effects of what is a digital bank.
The fundamental hypothesis here is we are meeting the needs of our clients through full service, through incentivizing and getting behavior change, and then importantly, offering them functionality through the face and the power of technology they can't get elsewhere. At the client level, I think that does remarkably well. At the organization of Discovery's at Discovery Bank level, we are getting considerable revenue coming in.
We're getting the right correlations, and we're getting a model that over time is entirely fixed, a fixed cost base. As you scale that, the economic value that it creates is quite remarkable. Let me just firstly tell you the facts of kind of the big numbers that make it clear. I think the client acquisition has been very strong. Total clients now exceed 400,000. Total accounts over 850,000. Deposits ZAR 9.5 billion, as you can see, and advances have grown. We kept the advances quite steady. We've now started to open the tap slightly and be very cautious. We're up to ZAR 4.2 billion. Operating results reflects a turnaround.
It's better than plan of ZAR 498 million. We hope we can bring that down quite quickly. I think the critical issue here is to look at the key KPIs that will make the bank scale and make the bank highly profitable. I think from that perspective, we are very pleased. The first is growth, acquisition of clients.
We're growing now at about 750 clients or more per day. It's ahead of plan. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, you can see the kind of daily acquisition that's kind of really started to climb from September as the functionality of the bank. I think everything solid, the service, every aspect, I think the bank has been strong. The new business composition.
Sorry, one other point that you can see, it's a busy slide on the left-hand side, is it's intriguing when you look at the scale of the banking model. You know, Discovery has a number of businesses, health, life, insure, invest, et cetera. The life and insure businesses, typically, when they really are doing well, are about 200-300 cases a day. The health business is about 600 cases a day. When you think about the bank pulling in 750 or more, hopefully getting to 1,000 a day, you can see in terms of scale, the banking space is incredibly big and gives us a vindication for the view that we can add considerable value to the group in that regard.
The new business composition, it's interesting that 46% of our clients coming in are not Discovery members before, and that's, of course, a very good thing. Our channels are starting to really fire. For the first time, the broker channel, and I think post-December, this has become even more so. Our intermediated channel, our agents are selling the bank. That's very powerful. They sell high advice, high value clients, get people engaged, early on. The product mix now is over 50%, high value products. The acquisition is strong, ahead of plan, and we're very pleased with the quality of it. The second point, and I think this is a crucial point I wanted to make, the non-interest revenue, the fee revenue coming in is very strong.
Spend in the bank, people using the bank, is strong. Through our definition, about 34%, 35% to 40% of our clients are primary clients, as you can see. 40% to 80% of the clients are active on the bank. Those statistics, I think, are considerably ahead of what we expected. An amazing statistic, I think one of the real challenges for starting a bank is, can you get people actually to use the bank at scale and generate the kind of revenue that you need? I think the answer there seems to be an unequivocal yes. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart that our current NIR per client per month is about 16% higher than the average of the big four banks.
Bear in mind also, the bank is new with new functionality, so it takes people time to actually engage and understand all the functionalities. When you look at people who are using the bank over six months or over 12 months in duration, the average NIR is substantially higher than all of the big banks. We're getting increasing confidence about the quality of the clients coming in, the usage of the bank, and the resulting fees coming in. The advances book is growing well. As you can see, we're about 20% of the credit card market above in the high income bracket. Visa tells us in the Signature and Infinite, which is in the high end of the market, we are the number one that they see in terms of market share.
The advances book has grown nicely over the period. Credit loss ratio has come down remarkably strongly, and the result of that is the net interest margin is widening, and the total NII is climbing very, very nicely, as you can see. I think we're very pleased with the correlations. The shared value model is working well.
The correlations between people going from blue through to gold and diamond is incredible. You can see that the average deposits being funded by our gold and diamond members is disproportionate. The revenue from them is disproportionate. I think what's critical, you can see on the right-hand bottom of the chart, the arrears rate by Vitality Money status is incredibly correlated. As you increase your status, the chance of default goes down.
I think the intriguing thing that the bank team pointed out to me is it's a much more granular way of segmentation than the traditional way of just doing a gold platinum. You can see on the left-hand side, much more granular, giving you much more data. I think the segmentation using a number of factors, of course, is better than just looking at income levels. The correlations I think are appropriate, and therefore we're kind of sharing value in a sense with the clients that we should be. I think a critical point in bringing it all together, the actual economic model is starting to work. This is a digital bank in terms of its functionality and its efficiency, and we're getting considerable jaws opening up between expenses and between revenue.
You can see on the left-hand side of the chart that revenue over the calendar year grew by about 10% or so per client. The expenses per client, as we've grown and scaled, has dropped by about 30% to 35%. You get this massive set of jaws opening. Across all of the critical success factors, I think we are very pleased that the performance of the bank, in fact, is quite ahead of plan. When you go back to the business plan and you look at kind of what we see the J-curve doing and how we see it emerging to profitability and critically to scale, you can see what's happening.
The chart on the left kind of shows where we currently are in the green, the base business plan and then the upside business plan. What you will see across most of the measures, acquisition of clients, average MRR, the advances book, the credit loss ratio and the expense growth, we typically are doing quite a bit better than the base plan. You can see it playing out in the projection of how the bank's profitability should emerge. The dotted green line is if we continue doing what we are currently doing. You can see that the bank will outperform even the upside of our business plan. It should break even in 2024, our financial year 2024.
At that point, that's at about closely 700,000 clients, and thereafter you'll see considerable growth in profitability. If we achieve that, the internalized return on the investment should be very, very significant. We're feeling very positive about where the bank is. Importantly, this is a full service bank. It's a shared value bank, but it is digital, and it gives us that efficiency. The point I'd end with, and a lot of work is taking place, is that the bank is such a powerful capability for the Discovery Group in South Africa in the sense that if it is what we are building and we have hopes for what it can achieve, it has the ability to monetize behavior. It has secure payment rails, it has payment systems, it has Discovery Miles as a currency.
More and more what we are seeing happening, you'll see that play out in the next few months, is all of our products will end up on the face of the bank. A kind of metaverse, I hate to use that overused term, but a metaverse of financial products on the face of the bank. The architecture of the bank ecosystem, rewards, payments is exactly the same as the health system, the same as Vitality, same as Invest, same as Discovery Life.
You will see the products sit on the face of the bank with the bank's power to really create the composite bank and allows us to differentiate in the rest of the group. Very, very powerful strategy for us. I think anecdotally, feedback we're getting from clients and the service and the usage is remarkable.
Rolling out real-time FX and the stuff that we're rolling out, you'll see Vitality Travel soon roll out is really, really exciting and we're seeing the traction that we're getting. Let me move on to Discovery Health. I'm gonna make some comments. Obviously this is a massive business and its financials don't really give a sense of its social impact. Its performance has been staggering, I think, across every variable. Operating profit is up 5%. Robust stuff. New business up 29%. Very, very interesting increase in new business. A function of two things. One is very strong flow of individual health business into Discovery Health. A function, we would guess kind of a flat economy during a pandemic. I think that's expected.
The other point that hopefully is some optimism is that a lot of our new business comes from employer groups hiring more people. Now last number of years, that's been negative. We've seen a shedding of jobs. In fact, we've seen the opposite in the client base is actually more people coming just by virtue of the employers recovering, getting a bit larger, and that I think is a good thing. You can see the growth in the membership. The growth in non-scheme products is also growing, I think, strongly. We wanted to make the point about just the, I think, the quality of management of Discovery Health and the manifestation inside the Discovery Health Medical Scheme. The Medical Scheme is a separate entity.
These are unaudited numbers, but at the end of the year you can see the scale of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme, just under 58% market share. I think amazingly in the middle of the chart, I wanted to show you the issue of stability. The narrative around healthcare is affordability, rightly so. People really battle to afford medical scheme coverage and people are concerned about different plans.
In reality, what you're seeing is an incredibly stable picture over nearly a decade, as you can see. I wanted to show plan movements. In other words, people buying up or down from their coverage is negligible. Typically 4% or 5% or 6% of people every year buy up or down in equal measure in terms of benefits. They're not buying down in any big sense.
As you can see over the time, that has not only stayed stable, it's actually reduced. In the last two years, you've seen very, very little movement. Then below that, you can see the lapse rate outside of Discovery Health and Discovery Health Medical Scheme is very, very low. The scheme is triple-A rated. Amazingly, it's built up ZAR 31 billion of cash or near cash that it holds in reserves. It's extremely strongly capitalized. I think the consistency of the management comes through when you look at all of the closed schemes. Over the last probably five or six years, there's been a focus on acquiring closed schemes as well that Discovery Health manages. You can see now we manage about 18 closed schemes.
Across every measure, and I think the two that are highly relevant, solvency and rate increases, the performance has been exceptional. Most of the schemes we manage, solvency has increased. We've managed to keep contribution rate increases at or below medical inflation. There's been a very consistent approach of Discovery Health. I think this composite model of Discovery Health at an end-to-end from Vitality capabilities through to managing every single aspect of the healthcare system plays out very, very well. We did wanna make a few comments on just healthcare. This is a hugely complex topic and, you know, I wouldn't want to delve into it here, and our team can say a lot more about this.
To make the point that we've seen healthcare usage starting to reach levels that are pre-COVID. On the left-hand side of the chart, you can see outpatient and inpatient. I think the worries from our data is population health has worsened. We're seeing the effect of people not accessing the healthcare system. You know, levels of a percentage of people with diabetes, HIV, cancer, mental health has dramatically increased. You can see that mental health is 1.5% of lives. That's now shot up to 5% of people with mental health issues. The disease burden certainly has worsened. That is, I think an upsetting and terrible result from a social perspective, but the scheme itself will certainly have increased consumption going forward.
In the third panel, you can also see that the scheme, kind of the disease burden has shifted. COVID has brought about a massive shift towards paying for infectious diseases. As you can see, that's crowding out some of the other spend. Our view on the right-hand side of the chart is that we will see COVID certainly feature prominently for some time. The scheme spent about ZAR 7 billion on COVID during the 2021 year. We expect the same in 2022. It's a huge amount of expense, ZAR 7 billion. In fact, a shift from hospitalization more towards vaccines, et cetera. Then a worrying sign around diabetes post-COVID and cardiac conditions post-COVID seems to be a concern for us.
Mortality and morbidity over time could worsen due to the effect of COVID. You know, we're scratching the surface, but there are some important trends about healthcare consumption going forward. Let me turn to Discovery Life and make the point that I think that Discovery Life performed remarkably well. Like Discovery Health, it's not just about the numbers.
It funded massive amount of death claims during this period. In the second panel, you can see the scale of death claims being funded. The total amount of claims gross paid out was ZAR 6.4 billion. That was funded through all different kinds of structures, FinRe, other structures in Discovery Life. The business has stayed remarkably robust. Despite that, its performance is excellent. Profit growth was strong, positive experience variances, good new business generation.
To make the point I kind of alluded to at the start, you can see on the left-hand side of the chart, operating profit up by 1%. It's just under ZAR 2 billion for the six months. One percent looks fairly flat. Just bear in mind, we've paid out ZAR 6.4 billion of claims. Essentially, ZAR 6.4 billion of assets in the system, Discovery Life is smaller from. We will essentially lose the returns on those assets we would have ordinarily got to. At kind of 7% to 8%, that's about ZAR 500 million a year or about ZAR 200 million-ZAR 300 million per half year. That's more than 10% of the earnings.
Just to give you a sense that the effect of COVID, while I think Discovery Life has done remarkably well and is extremely strong, makes the business in effect smaller by that ZAR 6 billion. You see that in the operating profit growing by 1% instead of 10%. Of course, it should now grow off that base of 1% as it goes forward. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, the cash flow generation. About ZAR 640 million of net cash generated. ZAR 2.1 billion of cash invested in new business strain left ZAR 640 million of cash left over after the COVID impact, kind of almost a break even.
It kind of even with the COVID claims, managed to kind of break even from a cash flow perspective. A function, I think, of strong liquidity and a function of strong reinsurance arrangements. In the middle, we show you the capital coverage. The solvency coverage is very strong. Liquidity coverage is very strong. To the earlier point I made, our view very strongly is we don't believe we need additional earnings provisions. The businesses are well capitalized and strongly liquid. You will see the embedded value build up is strong. Good positive experience variances overall, just under ZAR 290 million on the left-hand side of the chart. We did get negative experience variances, mainly from morbidity, from disability, and some claims we believe are kind of a hangover from COVID, maybe misclassified.
You can see a very strong experience on the left side as well that counterbalanced that. You see the buildup of the embedded value strongly up. Unwind of the discount rate. Good new business, good experience variances. In the right-hand side of the chart, to make the point, our value of new business is recovering somewhat. It's not quite at the pre-COVID levels, but a lot better than the previous comparative period. The quality I think is good. I think we're very pleased about Discovery Life, and you'll see quite a bit of innovation coming out of Discovery Life and again, coming to the bank. As potentially a set of rails, Discovery Life will make use of that going forward. Let me talk briefly to Discovery Invest.
Make the point that I think the performance has been very, very robust. Normalized operating profit up 10%. Strong new business flow. Lapses are even tighter, so persistence has been remarkable. In the shared value model of incentivizing people to save earlier, draw down less, be healthier, we see considerable benefits for us. We've seen 12% lower drawdowns. We've seen people saving far more than expected to retirement. Then these ideas of kind of the notional value of boost. That if you do this stuff, your retirement fund is boosted. The notional boost here now is about ZAR 13 billion. So it's considerable value I think building up for customers. I'm not going to say more. I think the business is very strong. Its annualized profit is now over ZAR 1 billion, we hope so. It's a business of scale.
There's considerable developments taking place we'll announce the next number of months. I will leave it at that. Let me turn to the one business that has been difficult for us during this period, Discovery Insure. The growth has been strong. You can see gross written premium continues to grow to 13%. The number of cars, vehicles insured has grown by 11%. You're just under 300,000. So the business now is of considerable scale. The new business down 3%. But if you look at the graph, you can see the previous period was a bit of a blowout. We should get back there. The obvious issue here is that the business really generated very little profitability, and that is the fundamental issue.
To make the point, the model is working, I think, incredibly well. You can see that the second panel shows you the loss ratio. The claims level per people as they engage in Vitality Drive comes down dramatically. People at the diamond level have nearly a 50% lower claims ratio than people at the blue level. That's the kind of correlations we want. At the same time, in the first panel, people tend to stick at the high levels of Vitality Drive. The cross multiplication of the two should give us a lower loss ratio as we go forward. That's precisely what we've seen. You can see that by duration, the loss ratio comes down to about 50% of what it would have been as people actually move through the process.
If you look at the book aging, the effect on the book is dramatic. We've seen that in the loss ratio. On the right-hand side, I think this is the critical chart to look at, the loss ratio has been about 55% or thereabout in the previous periods. Quite excellent, even pre-COVID around 57%. The actual absolute loss ratio claims level has been exceptional. In the period under review, you can see that purple part of the chart. It's bumped up by 5%, or so, really driven by weather, by fire claims, by power surges. A lot of detail in that chart. I don't intend to take you through it. If you do a breakdown of that kind of that increase, it's primarily high motor repair costs. We're not sure.
We're not seeing the narrative necessarily in the industry. Our people have drilled down into the actual detail by bolt, by bumper, by part, as you can see on this chart. Massive levels of price inflation from underlying cost of the stuff to shipping costs, et cetera. Our market share on the right-hand side may be different. We may be over-indexed in certain manufacturers where there is inflation. We don't know that it is different to the rest of the industry, but we're seeing a considerable effect on the loss ratio. We need to manage this. That's what we are. That's our job. There's no intention at all to sit here and say that the Insure team is a victim of inflation. It's not. We have to do better on this.
The team has a five-point plan that they'll put in place. By the end of this financial year, which is June, we should have restored the margin to where we should have been. The effect of that hopefully will be felt over the six months, but much more primarily over the next financial year. Let me turn to the U.K. I mean, just make the point. I think I'm way over time. Am I right? I think I am. Sorry, Forsyth. I don't mean to be too long-winded on this. The U.K.'s performance has been staggering. If you look at the group in total, operating profits have grown by 36% across the book across the business. Lives covered now is just under 1.5 million, as you can see.
New business growth, a slightly difficult environment, grown by 7%. Vitality Health had an absolute exceptional period. Operating profit up 44% to just under GBP 42 million in six months. I mean, I think the scale is now very, very material. You can see across every measure, the new business continues to grow very strongly by 15% over the period. So there really is. I think the delivery of service quality of the products is noticed and seen. In a very competitive market, you get traction when you do that. The reason for the growth in profitability is factually a kind of cost multiplication of excellent performance across lapse rates. You can see on the left-hand side, coming down and staying down.
There's an incredibly powerful algorithm that the U.K. has used, and we're learning in the group around how best to do that. That's been applied to VitalityLife as well. There's continual focus on efficiencies and expenses. That continues to happen. On the right-hand side, you get this geared effect. If you get your new business to grow and your lapses to go down, you get this net growth in lives added, as you can see there. It's quite substantial. The business itself grew by 154,000 lives. The growth has been really quite remarkable. On the claims side, we're seeing authorization levels kind of getting to the same level as pre-COVID. The claims are coming back, but they're less severe. Our kind of calculus on it is really a focus on claims management.
You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, we're doing a lot of stuff digitally, a lot of outpatient care, primary care, virtual consultations. The team did 100,000 virtual consultations over the year, which I think is remarkable. The use of our networks has cut costs dramatically. Then things like mental health or talking therapy is being done digitally. A lot of that is controlling costs quite dramatically. There's a very strong focus on managing the claim costs very carefully. The performance of Vitality Health is staggering. The business is strong, and it really is a function of, I think, doing everything well. Vitality Life is also something that I think the team is and should be remarkably proud of it.
It's a business that two periods ago, you can see on the left-hand panel, had a very, very difficult time with interest rates going down. Every single issue was problematic. The team put in place a 10-point plan, pretty substantial, and we've reported on that at every period. Now the group is now very strong. Premiums, earned premiums have gone up, lives have gone up. New business is up 3%. It's moderate, but we actually took a view. You can see the drop-off in that 10-point plan to getting rid of any kind of business that didn't meet our return on capital criteria. The quality of business, I think, is exceptional. I'm just restating on the left-hand side this plan that focused on operations, capital, hedging on interest rates, focusing on liquidity.
Every single issue was looked at in the business, and every single one of it has delivered. The last point, I think, to de-risk in the business is part of the book whole life policies that were sitting on the balance sheet of Prudential in a very flexible interest rate environment presents real capital volatility. In the process, one of the plans was to try and defer that transfer into our balance sheet, and that's what we've done. We agreed with Prudential in principle to leave that book there in their balance sheet for the long term, and we'll manage that going forward. It's been an excellent partnership, and we hope that that continues. You can see lapse rates continue to go down.
You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, I think the effectiveness of the hedge structure we put in place. As rates go up, the swaption value tends to mirror the increase or decrease in liabilities. We're getting a smoothing out of the effect of interest rates. I'd say it's a job really well done. I think the UK team can and should be very proud, I think, of the performance that has been achieved. The products on the ground to our customers are doing well. Let me turn to Vitality Global. I think the focus here has been very, very careful. We are trying to build two distinct business units in Vitality Global. Different but of the same platform in effect, insurance partner markets.
Insurance partner markets and then Vitality Health International. The insurance partner markets is something we started out with. We pioneered that with AIA, and we now moved it out to many, many markets with exceptional partners across the world. It takes the Vitality shared-value insurance model, and really integrates it into existing products. The revenue we get is on a fee basis, so per client, per percentage of new business, performance fees, et cetera, management contracts of value. Vitality Health International these are typically equity shares in businesses that we are buying into and building. Ping An Health, obviously the most relevant and super powerful and big. Very pleased with the progress there. In the period under review, Amplify Health that we think will be substantial.
interesting between Ping An Health and Amplify Health, we effectively have 25% exposure to the entire Asian health insurance base in one form or another with two exceptional partners. I would argue the biggest and strongest in China, Ping An, and then across pan-Asia, AIA. I think what Vitality Health has in its belly is remarkable. We've got to make it grow and make it really substantial. I think that is what is happening. Just going back to how we reported before the Vitality Group to give you consistency. You can see the integrated premium income of our partners has grown by 37% over the period to just under ZAR 12 billion. The revenue grew by 16%. You can see the operating result in dollars is slightly better than in rands, up 7%.
To make the point, the previous period had this very big Forex gain. If you look at the actual progression, I think the growth is very strong. Then you see insurance partner markets, the membership has grown to 2.7 million. The growth, I think, is strong. The insurance partner markets itself, if you look at that particular line, I think it's important. We often ask this question, how does it seem to have scale and it's growing, but how do you monetize this? The first point to make is I think the model is working well. You can see if you look at levels of engagement across every market we deal with, it's remarkable. We built a model that I think is repeatable, scalable.
We kind of know the data as we roll it out with our partners. That tends to be very strong and very predictable. From an economic perspective, essentially, we have contracts across the world with various partners. The contracts are long term in nature, and they are driven by, I would guess, five distinct KPIs. First, the number of markets we're in, the number of contracts, obviously. Secondly, the penetration rates per product that we managed to achieve, the engagement levels per product, the number of integrated products that we have linked to it, and then of course, ultimately, that comes down to how much premium and how many members are linked into the system. For the first time, I actually thought to show you know, what is the present value of the contracts that we have.
What you see in the middle of the panel. By 2021, if you valued the present value of fee revenue we expect going forward of the contracts, it's about $1 billion, as you can see. I think very importantly, you can see that's climbed over time. The climbing over time is a function of, I think, the quality of what's being done. Critically, we are writing more contracts as we go along. Then on the right-hand side to show you the dynamics, we are getting the contracts manifest in revenue per year, as you can see. By 2022, we expect the revenue to be about $70 million to $80 million. Then against that, there's an expense that we have in managing that. The difference between the two simply is the margin.
The margin's currently about 40% or thereabout, and we expect that margin with scale to get to about 60%, as you can see in the chart, as we project forward. There's considerable value, we believe, building up in this business, and it should manifest in very strong revenue or very strong profitability and very little capital, as we go forward. The second piece of Vitality Global is Vitality Health International. If you follow us, you will know that we've built a capability there and a structure to manage that very, very carefully. I've made the point that it owns equity stakes carefully in Ping An Health and Amplify's as we've played out. I think Amplify is, for us, one of the biggest things that we'll do.
It's an interesting and important development for us because what it really is is what I think we thought we would do with our partners. If the Vitality model works well, and if we deliver well with partners, we believe it would lead to bigger things. I think we've made that point. Amplify is an exact example of that. We've had a tremendous partnership with AIA over a decade. They have pioneered with us the Vitality shared value model. Essentially, as we've gone forward, just with the power of health insurance, AIA is already a massive health insurance player across the region. There's a real desire to actually offer considerably more sophisticated management of healthcare. The Amplify structure has been about 18 months in the making. We formed this entity called Amplify Health.
We announced this, I think, two weeks ago. Essentially, I think it is a very simple corporate structure. It is an entity. It's not an insurance entity. It doesn't take insurance risk. It is really an insurtech company. AIA will own 70% or does own 75% of it. We own 25% as Discovery. AIA will put in its existing markets, its distribution, its capabilities, its scale across Asia, and it will put in capital. Discovery puts in the entire kind of Vitality stack together with the entire Discovery Health stack of capabilities of tech. In addition, we see transferring probably 250 people into Amplify with a number of subject matter experts to bring that expertise into Amplify Health. We see considerable value for us over time. We own 25% of the equity.
AIA will fund up to $200 million of capital. Our capital, so up to $800 million of the first capital required to grow the business, will be funded by AIA. We believe scale will be achieved through that. In addition, Discovery will continue to get our Vitality fees from AIA as we have done, in addition to additional performance fees coming out of the existing captive business of Amplify Health. There's a considerable opportunity we believe. To make the point clearly, as I said, the kind of reversing of skills into Amplify, the asset base really is coming out of the Vitality capability, and then all of the technology embedded in Discovery Health is being lifted and shifted into Amplify.
Off that base, the team, that's a strong team that's been built there, will continue to develop that. We'll possibly make acquisitions. We'll see how that plays out, but we'll considerably strengthen that capability. That then will manifest in a number of products, data and analytics, value-based networks. Many of the things that we do, even the core claims operations, all that through to digital consultations, will be offered to existing AIA health businesses, which is the captive market, and then a number of things across the region, other corporates, other payers, et cetera. The market is massive, and our first port of call, of course, will be the existing AIA health insurance businesses. We think the opportunity is substantial.
Just bear in mind on the right-hand side of the chart, this is a market that is already the Asian healthcare system, $1.5 trillion. It's growing at rates that are far greater than anywhere else in the world, and the expectation by 2030 is a $4 trillion market. Bear in mind, AIA's scale, they have nearly 40 million customers across the region. The opportunity is quite substantial. There is nothing theoretical here. There's been a lot of work done about the actual applicability of our capabilities. Bear in mind, Discovery Health manages the healthcare the Discovery Health medical scheme. This is not that different than taking that capability and managing the health insurance of existing captives within AIA. There's an example on the chart on the bottom left-hand corner.
In one of the markets, we've already tested a lot of the systems. We've seen, for example, when it comes to fraud, waste, and abuse, this is a massive player. We think we can save 12% of the claims cost just by kind of sifting it through that technology that we have. The opportunities here, I think, for Amplify, for AIA and us as shareholders and, of course, for AIA itself as a health insurer are seen to be quite remarkable. This is a very important development for Discovery, and I think the scale of it going forward will be substantial. I thought it important to hear from AIA's CEO, my counterpart, Lee Yuan Siong, who's driving it from AIA's perspective.
There are tremendous opportunities for both of us from transforming healthcare in Asia. Amplify will become a key part of AIA's health and wellness strategy and an intrinsic competitive advantage for us, helping to grow new business value and delivering many financial benefits such as improved claims performance and lower operational costs. Now the real work starts. I know that everyone at AIA joins me in looking forward to working with Adrian and our Discovery colleagues to make our vision for Amplify Health a reality. I have every confidence that together we will help millions more people live healthier, longer, better lives. Thank you.
I should make the point, I think that the JV being set up is powerful. The capital being put in is substantial. The quality of the people, it's an exceptional capability. I think it's important to say the relationships that we have with AIA, the friendships, the trust, the good faith. You know, most JVs don't have a history. We do. It's a 10-year history with a lot of people in AIA. There's a lot of besides kind of financial capital, but there's real human capital. I think that's quite exciting for us and the opportunity to work with the AIA team. Let me end off with Ping An Health. Very, very important, of course, in the Discovery capability. I think the performance now is about scale and quality. You can see the
Our share of operating profit has grown by 25% in the period after tax. The actual operating profit, Ping An Health works on a calendar year. This is the last six months of their year. It grew by 9% to ZAR 1.1 billion. The company is getting considerable scale. I think the fundamental issue to note here is that there's been a change in the distribution strategy. To scale Ping An Health, in the past, there are many regions in China where Ping An Health doesn't have a branch and therefore couldn't transact business. In those markets in the past, Ping An Life has sold health insurance and then retroceded or reinsured part of their business with Ping An Health.
What's happened in the past is that in many markets where we do have licenses, Ping An Health and Ping An Life have written and transacted business directly with Ping An Health. To get scale, we've used Ping An Life in markets where we don't have a branch, and that manifests in small amounts of earned premium coming in as a result of this reinsurance business. We've now agreed with Ping An Life, given the scale of Ping An Health, that will taper off, and you can see that we made that point in the announcement. New business coming down by 21%. We don't expect that to affect the profitability as we change the distribution going forward. The quality and scale of Ping An Health is remarkable. If you look over its calendar year, it grew by 44%.
You can see the majority of the growth tends to happen in the first six months of the year. You can see the scale, what's been built. The company now covers over 31 million lives. The profit margin's about 7%. Return on equity nearly 28%. Considerable solvency strength of over 200%. Net assets of about 8, I think, ZAR 8 billion. The business has achieved tremendous scale. From our analysis, it's the 16th most profitable insurer in China out of eight insurers, and its market share in the health space is about 8.5%. The scale being built, I think, is quite significant. The distribution strategy, I think for us now is to grow the Ping An branches, our own branches across China.
I think that's important. You can see on the left-hand side, there's a lot of China that Ping An Health does not have branches in, but in fact, the branch network currently is in areas that represent about 58% of the GDP. I think the basis of really moving to the strategy is, I think, quite clear given the scale of Ping An Health. Writing direct business on the Ping An Health license is different. We control 100% of the pricing of every aspect of the product. We control the expenses, the commissions. We can manage the risk. We've seen over time that business is of exceptional quality. There's a very strong focus on expanding the branch network. I think it's crucial.
At the same time, developing new channels of distribution, and that will happen. We are, I think, very positive about Ping An Health, excited by the scale, and expect that profitability to continue to grow as we go forward. Let me end the formal presentation. It's been a lengthy process. I hope I've got across to you the kind of three focal areas of our strategy. We've done concurrently navigating COVID, driving good growth, at the same time, being very, very careful around operating performance, and very importantly, staying strong in terms of capital and liquidity in a very, very uncertain space.
I hope I've got across to you as well the strategies of what we're trying to do and the considerable growth potential, be it Ping An Health, Discovery Bank, Amplify Health, and the ability of the existing business in the U.K. and elsewhere to grow organically. We are moving ahead in the next six months. I think you'll see a very strong performance in the six months. There's risk to the environment, obviously, coming forward, but I think we're feeling very confident about where the group is placed. That's it for me, Dion. I think I've been a bit long-winded here.
Yeah.
Trying to get the points across. What we'll do now, if you're comfortable, is there will be a number of questions. I'll just pass them on to our team. Will we read them out, Dion? They're coming on the screen.
Yeah, they're on the screen there. So first one from Michael Christelis. Are there plans to roll out other health JVs like Amplify Health with other global Vitality partners?
I mean, I would answer that and say I think there are opportunities to do that. I think Amplify Health gives us credibility, but I think there's a lot to be done in the context of Amplify Health, massive lift and shift to be done. If we get that to work well, there could be repeatability of that model over time. But at the moment, no, I think let's bed down what is a massive initiative. Should we keep going?
Yeah. The second question from Talia Gihl: Given the high rates of immigration of high net worth individuals and the upper class, where does your growth in customer base come from?
I mean, Hilton, Calum, I'd also want to comment on that. It's not clear that we've seen any real effect of immigration on numbers, on size of the market. I think economically, when people leave, others take their place. I don't believe we see that as a real threat to the market. I don't know. Only if your country gets poorer would you have that effect, I would guess. Hilton, maybe you can talk to that. I mean, I guess it's
I think I agree with that, Adrian. I think given our market shares in the respective product areas, you know, there's significant opportunities for growth. And as you say, you know, we see sort of an emerging affluent market as well within South Africa. And that definitely presents an opportunity. I mean, I think maybe one other point to make is that our client base is growing across all socioeconomic categories in all product lines. So, you know, if you look at Discovery Health, for example, we've got low income products, which are the largest in the market and growing incredibly strongly. And in the context of the bank, you know, our product range spans the entire market.
Albeit that we've got a very high market share in the sort of affluent segment.
Thanks, Hilton. Waiting for some more.
Adrian.
Are there,
As far as I can see, those are the only two that came through up to now. If I refresh that.
That's it?
That it?
Sure.
That's it.
Are we very clear when no one's watching us? We hope it's the former. It's been always a pleasure presenting results, Dion.
Yeah.
Again, to our team, just, well done and congratulations on the great results. Very, very exciting way forward. All of us worry about where the world is at, but, wishing you all, peace and safety as we go forward. Thanks very much for listening.