Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome to the 2021 interim results announcement of China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd. I'm Su Shaojun, Board Secretary of CPIC Group. It's our great pleasure to exchange views with all of you, and also to share with you our interim results for the first half of this year. Also listen to your advice and suggestion regarding our development. Given the COVID-19 situation, we're going to conduct this results announcement online, and we use Mandarin for the meeting, and also provide English simultaneous interpretation. As per regulatory requirements, and to protect the interest of small and medium-sized investors, we used a lot of measures. For example, IR hotline and a dedicated email account, et cetera, and all other online measures. We have announced the date of this event on the 21st of August, and also solicited questions from our small and medium-sized investors.
In order to make this an interactive session, we are conducting this session in the afternoon of China, Shanghai, China. Of course, all investors can actually participate via live video broadcast and other online platforms. You can also watch the playback of this video of this event on our official website. Next, let me introduce the executives for this event. Mr. Kong Qingwei, Group Chairman, and Mr. Fu Fan, CPIC Group President, and Mr. Gu Yue, Chairman of CPIC P&C, and Ms. Pan Yanhong, Chairman of CPIC Life, and Mr. Ma Xin, Vice President of CPIC Group, Mr. Yu Yeming, Chairman of CPIC AMC, and Mr. Zhang Yuanhan, Chief Actuary of CPIC Group, and Mr. Cai Qiang, General Manager of CPIC Life. First, we'll have a presentation from Mr. Fu Fan about our first half results. Then we'll have a Q&A session. Let's give the floor to Mr. Fu Fan.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Fu Fan. Welcome to this event. It's our great pleasure to have this opportunity to communicate to all of you in online manner. As we know, COVID-19 is still raging, and we are facing uncertainties on a macro level. Given this kind of uncertainty and the complications, we are actually meeting challenges head on and delivered steady growth of business results. Our group operating income amounted to CNY 252 billion, up 7.2%. Our group net profit attributed to parent was CNY 17.3 billion, up 21.5%. Our group Embedded Value reached CNY 474.43 billion, up 3.3% from the end of 2020. What's important, we actually added over 10 million new customers for the first half of this year. As of now, actually our comprehensive solvency margin ratio reached 279% under China Risk Oriented Solvency System.
Our Operating Profit After Tax stripped out short-term investment movement, changes to evaluation assumption, and impact of material once-off factors. We reported CNY 18.2 billion in OPAT, up 4.9%, of which that of life insurance business was CNY 14.29 billion, up 6.7%. We are also making efforts to foster growth engine for the future. For example, we cooperate with Ruijin Hospital to establish the Guangci CPIC Internet Hospital, with the first CPIC family doctor product launched. We are also working on new channels, new products, and new technologies for our life business. We are establishing the first health-related fund with our partners. In big data strategy, we are establishing the CPIC Fintech and signed shared service agreements with other subsidiaries. We are actually delivering initial success in Shanghai, Chengdu and Wuhan.
We have recruited seven leading experts and put in place task forces in six areas such as big data, AI, cybersecurity, internet operation, cloud computing, and blockchain. In regional development, we intensified efforts in integrated development of key areas, formulated work programs for the five new cities of Jiading, Qingpu, Songjiang, et cetera, and also drew up and implemented the three-year action plan of Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau, and also signed agreement to jointly promote construction of the Greater Bay Area and a dedicated R&D center in that area.
We continue to deepen CPIC's services so that our labor will be responsible, intelligent, and caring. We have actually set up service officers in 5,800 branch offices across China. We continue to improve service supply and standards. For example, we launched a retirement community project in Wuhan with eight projects in seven cities under constructions.
With CPIC Home, we actually saw results in terms of retention of mid to high-level customers. We have issued actually a lot of admission certificates in the first half of this year, exceeding the total level of last year. In Shanghai, we participated in the city-specific commercial health insurance program, covering a total of 7.39 million people. We also built the dark factory, which centralized 102 automation scenarios and responded to 727,000 service requests. CPIC Life launched the Yang Yang customer service by your side to cover five scenarios, such as reminder of renewal payment and benefit payment collection. Our intelligent response ratio reached 97.35%. Next, let's took a look at the numbers. For CPIC Life, we see some kind of a bottleneck coupled with the challenges brought by COVID-19.
Specifically, in the first half of this year, CPIC reported CNY 10.23 billion in Value of New Business, down 8.9%. Annualized new premium of NBV calculation amounted to CNY 40.29 billion, a growth of 32.9%. NBV margin decreased by 11 basis points to 25.4%. We also launched various new products. We see our new business sales of our agency channel amounted to CNY 22.58 billion, growth of 18.5%. Our CPIC reported CNY 141.4 billion in Gross Written Premiums, a growth of 2.1%. Meanwhile, we also see steady increase in residual margin, which grew by 1.9%, amounting to CNY 357.7 billion. We continued with our quality development to boost high performance of our agents and the sales teams via amendments to rules on compensation and training and coaching, and by launching good products and launching good training systems.
In the first half of this year, the monthly average number of agents was 641,000, down by 16.3%. Our monthly average First Year Premium and First Year Commission per agent reached CNY 5,918 and CNY 986 respectively, up by 41% and 15% respectively. Going forward, CPIC Life will take a lot of measures to accelerate and restrict our agency force, diversify our channels, and step up capability in digitalization and building our health retirement system. For CPIC P&C, we are stepping up transformation to promote the shift of growth drivers and deliver steady premium growth. To be specific, our GWP reached CNY 81.56 billion, up 6.4%, of which auto business reported CNY 44.6 billion in GWP, down by 6.9%, and the non-auto business recorded CNY 36.9 billion, a growth of 28.6%.
Our combined ratio actually increased by 1 basis point to 99.3%, of which loss ratio was up by 10.4 bps, and expense ratio was down by 9.4 bps to 29.2%. The deepening reform of auto insurance posed a high requirement for business management. We are adapting to the changes and the challenges. We continue to enhance customer acquisition and retention, set up the center for individual customers to facilitate the building of a customer operation system. We're also increasing online application of our customers and promoting online and offline integration, so that our risk control capability continue to rise. Our auto insurance actually saw a rise of 1.2 ppts for combined ratio, and our expense ratio fell by 11.9 ppts to 26.3%. Loss ratio rose by 30.1 ppts to 72.7%.
For our health insurance, we see diversified supply of our products and the rapid development of innovative government-sponsored health insurance. For the first half of this year, we recorded CNY 8.2 billion in GWP for health insurance, a growth of 70%. Agricultural insurance also took on the opportunity of national initiatives and followed the new path of development, focusing on model innovation and service improvement. We saw CNY 6.7 billion in GWP, up by 17.5%. For liability insurance, we focus on the improvement of people's well-being and the supporting of real economy. We will deliver the CNY 6.71 billion in GWP, up 38.7%.
For our asset management business, our group Assets Under Management maintained steady growth, reaching CNY 2.56 trillion, up 5.3% from the end of 2020. The group in-house AUM was CNY 1.75 trillion, a growth of 6.3%. Third party AUM also increased 3.2%. We persisted in Asset-Liability Management .
Now, given the downward trend of interest rate, we face quite a lot of pressure in terms of reinvestment. We continue with our dumbbell strategy to increase allocation into long-term T-bonds and focusing on also moderately increasing investment in equity assets, including private equity. The share of fixed income assets stood at 77.7%, down by 0.6 PT. Investment of equity assets was up by 0.4 PT to 19.2%. Stocks and equity funds took up 9.9%, decrease of 0.3%. Looking at the numbers, actually, our annualized comprehensive investment yield fell by 0.5 PT to 4.8%. That's mainly because of the decrease in net of fair value movement of Available-for-Sale assets booked as other comprehensive income. Total investment income was up by 28.4%, and our annualized total investment yield was 5.0%, up by 0.2 PT. Our net investment income totaled CNY 35.3 billion, up by 8.3%.
That's mainly because of the increased interest income on fixed income investments. In the first half of this year, defaults were rising, so we maintained our prudence in credit risk exposure, and also while enhancing our credit risk management. Actually, you see 99.7% of enterprise bonds and financial bonds issued by non-government-sponsored banks had an issuer debt rating of AA, or A- 1, or above. Of this, the share of AAA reached 93.3%, and the share of AAA of the non-public financing instruments with extra credit rating for A A, A A+ was above 99.0%. As of now, actually, in terms of sector allocation, our assets are mainly concentrated in infrastructure, real estate, non-bank financial institutions, communication, and transportation.
Going forward, we're going to maintain our strategy, committed to close the gap in business operation and intensify efforts in quality improvement of our life insurance, so as to fulfill our annual budget. We will move towards strategic direction and target of best in customer experience, business quality and risk control. Reach breakthroughs in terms of professional capacity building of investment management, platform-based development of health service, marketization of technology.
Please star one to queue. Before you ask questions, please identify yourself and your employer, and please ask no more than two questions. Thank you for your cooperation. To ensure the quality of the transmission of the voice, please make sure that you are in a quiet place, and make sure that you do not use the speakerphone on your cell phone. Please mute yourself after you finish your questions.
Let's welcome the first question. Haitong Securities, Sun Ting.
I'd like to congratulate. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. I'm Sun Ting from Haitong Securities. Congratulations to the company for your quite solid performance, given this kind of challenging environment. Two questions from me. Number one is for Chairman Kong. You see for CPIC Group, and actually for all listed insurance companies, this year is a very challenging one. For investors' perspective, we see a lot of new uncertainties. For Chairman Kong, going forward, what's your view on the big environment for the industry development? CPIC-wise, what's your long-term strategy? Second focus of life question. Life sector is even more challenging this year. We see a lot of pressure for the business.
I'd like to ask CPIC Life, what's your view on the difficulties in the current environment? For mid to long-term, what's the next driving force for the life insurance market?
Thank you for your question. This result announcement, you see nine of us, nine executives on the stage to answer your questions. Most of our senior executives for Life and P&C are here. That means we stand ready to share with you. Actually, as far as I can remember, since 2017, I have been to all the results announcements, all of them. I have attended all of them. This is a particular difficult year, this year. Actually, this kind of difficulty actually calls for wisdom and resolution and confidence from the managers, from top executives.
I would like to say that if we look back on the first half of this year for CPIC, I would say change is the keyword, given COVID-19 and other kind of challenges. It's not end. It's still ongoing. For CPIC, I believe the keyword for CPIC is steadiness or stableness. Steadiness does not mean we do not change at all. No, I would say we would like to have a stable, steady growth, steady improvement. What do I mean by steady improvement? I mean, despite all the challenges, externally, we should move upwards. You see, we have just celebrated our 30th anniversary. If we look back, actually, it's not been plain sailing all the way. We actually crossed different macroeconomic cycles. We persist in long-termism, going for the long run. Actually, we keep pursuing being customized, being customer-oriented.
We always focus on sharing, share with our customer, return to our shareholders. We always focus on the value of our business. This is even more so this year. We focus on the value of life business and also the quality of our P&C and life business, and also the stable performance of our investment. As Mr. Fu actually shared with you a lot of numbers of CPIC, now I believe all those numbers actually is a reflection of the hard work of CPIC employees. As far as I can remember, I can recall several phenomena. For example, actually in the first half of this year, CPIC new business actually met our target. New business growth on Million Dollar Round Table actually exceeded 1,000 people. We also stood the test of auto insurance reform, and we also see good results for non-auto business.
For agricultural insurance this year, the annual premium income is likely to exceed CNY 10 billion. For the investment side, we also saw stable returns. I admit we are entering a new cycle of sector or industry development. We will see changes. We will utilize the change to develop a new growth engine. As Mr. Fu Fan mentioned, for example, we are developing or making progress in health-related sectors with accelerated progress. For example, in Beijing, Qingdao, we are going to see projects under construction, starting construction. For Chengdu and Dalian, we are going to finish two projects. Our collaboration with Ruijin Hospital, that is the Guangci CPIC Internet Hospital, have launched the first products that is called Taiyi Guanjia. That is like a CPIC Home family doctor. We would provide customer with pharmacy service, diagnosis service online.
We are doing test drives for our CPIC fintech company. We are actually accelerating the process of getting approvals from the regulators. Supported by the board, we are developing the five-year plan, the business plan. We are going to step up efforts in terms of products, investment, liabilities, et cetera, and to develop green economy, green business development. We also know that there will always be uncertainties, and insurance in itself is to actually prepare for the uncertain future by certain contribution today. We are doing all the solid things, the right things. Of course, the solid things, the hard things is difficult. It's difficult to do them. We remain confident that what we are doing is to actually preparing for uncertain future.
We need to focus on the small and the specific solid things so that we can continue with our steady and prudent development for the company, so that we can return or give a good result to our shareholders, our employees, and more importantly, our customers. Thank you.
Thank you for your question. As Chairman Kong mentioned just a moment ago, CPIC Life faced a lot of challenges. That's for the whole sector. I'm still very pleased to say that the annualized new premium income actually went up by over 30% for CPIC Life. That means there's not only challenges, but also opportunities for our company. I believe the challenges or the difficulties are both internal and external. For external difficulties, COVID-19 and the economic slowness, doldrum, and also more regulations for life insurance. All these are posing pressures in the short term.
Internally, I believe that it's a business model thing. There's a huge challenge to the traditional model. The requirement and the needs, demand for life insurance is not going down because China has just surpassed the so-called mid-income trap, that's $10,000 per capita income. According to international experience, the $5,000-$10,000 per capita income is going to support faster growth of life insurance sector. Given this kind of low penetration level or rate in China, and also given the low per capita premium in China, the industry as a whole is still having great potential. Chinese people are normally family-focused people. We actually like to save money, we like to deposit money.
Actually, if you see Japan and South Korea, this kind of Northeast, Southeast Asian nations, we actually have a lot of requirement for saving, for protection in the future. I would say the life industry in China is like a rising sun at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the morning. Although in the short term, especially this year, we see big challenges, but in the long term, the future is still very promising. For the challenges for this year, I believe on one hand, there is a big demand as a whole, but on the other hand, our consumers, their preferences, their behaviors are changing rapidly. It's not like before. It's not like a face-to-face referral. It's not like they are fully believing in whatever you sell in the advertisement, in your talk script, in your pitching.
Because customers are demanding more professional service and products, and more customized solutions. They are having more requirements on supply side reform. The old model, traditional model, is getting harder and harder. Going forward, we must become needs-based, needs-oriented. We must be able to serve whatever the customer needs. Where is the new growth engine? Personally, I believe there are three things. Number one is to enforce sales force. I mean, agent team, agency sales team. Now, actually, we have a lot of good quality agents and also top-notch agent leaders. We need to help them transform themselves to become more professional, more digital, and more adaptive. I believe that is a key driving force for future growth. Secondly is that we actually have more than 160 million customers.
As Mr. Fu mentioned, we just added another 10 million first half of this year. 160 million, that's more than 10% of the Chinese population. They have very big needs for insurance. We need to think about how we can best serve these 160 million people, customers, maybe through more cross-selling, upselling, et cetera. I believe this is a huge potential pool of untapped business. We should not focus just on actually securing new customers, acquiring new customers. Actually, as we know in the sector, in the industry, an average customer would need seven to nine policies throughout his or her life. Currently, our customer, on average, only has fewer than two policies. As long as we can serve them to their satisfaction, there will be more referrals and upselling.
What's more, we see products are becoming more and more similar across different companies. We need to differentiate ourselves. Health service and retirement service would become even more and more important. We don't see a lot of innovation in terms of life insurance products, but the potential for service innovation is without limit, is infinite. I believe this could also be another driving force. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Kong and Mr. Cai. Let's welcome the second question. Swiss Reinsurance, Mr. Cheng Zhou.
Good afternoon. I'm Cheng Zhou from Credit Suisse. Number one, is still first question for Mr. Cai. I'd like to know. As a General Manager of CPIC Life, what's your specific ideas about second half of this year or next year? Second question, as I noticed on page five of this slide, there are three big directions. My second question is for Mr. Ma Xin about the health-related strategy for CPIC Group.
Thank you, Cheng. As I just mentioned, the three driving forces we are going to focus, I mean our agency sales force and our products, and also our services. Actually, starting from this year, we launched the Changhang Action Plan with specific targets and measures. We actually have launched the roadmap for phase I of the Changhang Action Plan. Among them, we will see a workplace marketing for our agency channel. You see, for a long time, many of the agents are part-time. Part-time agents, it will be very hard for them to sell complicated products.
With more and more products, and with products getting more and more complex, and with customers getting more and more sophisticated, given all these changes, the agent cannot serve the customer's needs. As a first step, our existing agency sales force shall become more professionalized. This is what we are going to do, a priority for us for the second half of this year and next year. Secondly, this service-based marketing. As I mentioned, we have 160 million customers. We need to serve them well, serve them to their satisfaction. We need to change our processes and procedures. We should first serve them and then sell insurance to them. It's not like we are pushing too hard. We are selling, and then there's nothing else. All we do is just to sell them stuff or insurance. We need to improve our service first.
We need to improve the capability of our service team to improve the experience of our customers, so that it's easier for us to achieve cross-selling, upselling on our existing customers. At the same time, we are also improving our products from a health side, protection side, and also retirement side, and also to the wealth heritage or inheritance side, so that our products could become more competitive. We are become more and more customer needs-based. That's the three main initiatives we are focusing now.
Well, thank you, Mr. Zhou, for your second question about the health-related strategy. To answer your question, just two things. Number one is that CPIC Group, in terms of the health business, you see, actually, on a combined basis, health insurance of CPIC Group achieved double-digit growth. That's very fast. I mean, the growth pace actually doubled the industry average.
Our medical insurance actually grew the fastest, and that's the most sticky part of the business. Currently, our health insurance mainly focused on critical illness business and medical insurance. We are focusing on enhancing the SA of Critical Illness insurance, CI products, and also to improve the penetration rate of medical insurance for the customers. On the CPIC strategy for health-related sectors. Chairman Kong Qingwei and Mr. Fu Fan have both mentioned about the health-related sector strategy. I would just mention or add two points. You see, for health insurance, we know two things for sure. Number one, the long-term inflation of medical bills.
For China, actually, I would say China's medical CPI or inflation is growing the fastest among major economies. The second certainty is that there is a rigid demand for medical services from our customers. We should base our strategy on these two certainties.
Starting from zero to one, we should starting from scratch. How can we start from scratch? We need to be market-oriented and professional. That is to say, we need to employ market strategies. For example, our internet medical team actually now consists of 400 doctors and doctor assistants, plus more than 200 IT professionals. All that took us only half a year. We launched the Taiyi Guanjia, the CPIC family doctor brand. This is, I would say, a market-based initiative or project. Of course, this team is still working very hard to improve, to iterate, and I welcome your suggestions and ideas on that initiative. Actually secondly, it took us very short period of time to set up a health-related industry fund. Now we have actually getting involved in 24 sub-projects covering medical equipment, digital medical services, biological pharmacy, et cetera.
The second factor is being professionalized. We are now offering this family doctor service. We are collaborating with Ruijin Hospital, a top-notch hospital in China. They are training our General Partners, our doctors, and we also joined stock for the Guangci Memorial Hospital, so that we can become more professional and win the trust from customers. After the share structuring improvement of our specialized health insurance company, we are now focusing on new channels, new products, and the new technology, and push ahead with key projects. We aim to turn a traditional health insurance company into an agile, professional health insurance company. On top of that, to build our health-related strategy for CPIC Group.
Thank you. Let's welcome the next question. Ge Yuxiang from Shenwan Hongyuan Securities
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Ge Yuxiang from Shenwan Hongyuan Securities.
I have some question on investment and P&C. You see, investment-wise, quite good performance. EV assumption, actually, we saw poor performance. AFS, there is a unrealized loss of CNY 1.8 billion. How come? Why is this unrealized loss? Second question on the P&C business. We see some volatility for the P&C profit. How are you going to improve your underwriting profitability going forward?
I answer your first question. Thank you for your question. You see for the first half of this year, our annualized net investment yield decreased by 0.3 ppts. That's mainly because of the downward trend of interest rate. Our newly allocated assets actually offering lower returns and also the share of fixed income assets also went down, because the denominator is mainly the interest rate income of fixed income assets, and also dividend payment from equity assets.
That's why there is a slight drop. Now, regarding ours, actually, we deployed disciplined investment tactics. At the beginning of this year, actually, we had some prediction and analysis of the macroeconomic situation. We believe there will only be structural opportunities for the equity market. For the first half of this year, you can see on the books face value, you see investment actually, given better than expected results. Reduced some of the pressures for the second half of this year. Also better prepared us for the long-term investment. Second, going forward, we'll continue with our study of the market to make sure we can meet the investment target for the whole year. As you mentioned, a provision of a potential unrealized loss. That's mainly because of the accounting treatment for equity assets.
That is, for any equity assets whose cap market value is lower than cost for longer than one year. We would take a loss provision for those stocks, to the tune of around CNY 1.2 billion. These stocks were all high dividend-paying stocks.
Well, thank you. Let me answer your P&C question. The auto reform starting from September last year. I believe it's been a year since the reform. You can see the result for our first half results. I believe, first of all, premium per vehicle dropped clearly or up significantly. You see for compulsory auto insurance, the upper limit actually increased for a lot. Only for the compulsory auto insurance, our claims or our claims payout increased by more than 10%. The COVID-19, of course, stabilized in China. We see more people traveling, driving around.
The more claims from the auto insurers. Claims ratio increased by more than 1% in the first half of this year. There are other uncertain factors. Despite all these uncertainties, we need to focus on what we can control. Therefore, we actually made a provision. We increased our reserves. The share of our unsettled reserve increased also. I believe that's mainly why the pressure for the overall business for P&C. Now, despite this pressure brought by auto insurance reform, we are still confident because this pressure would only force us to refine our management, refine our business development, and improve our customer operation. Now, actually, you see after years of our hard work, we are seeing good results. In the first half of this year, the number of our individual customers increased by 11%.
Also in terms of cross-selling between auto and non-auto business, there is an increase of 89%. The penetration rate increased by more than 20 percentage points to reaching around 40%. These active involvements offset partially the challenges brought by auto insurance reform. Of course, the pressure will continue in the second half of this year, and we are also seeing new measures to be launched for new energy vehicles. I believe in China, new energy vehicle, total number of new energy vehicle is likely to reach 2 million in China this year. For CPIC P&C, our share of the new energy vehicle is quite higher than our peers by 1- 2 percentage points. In terms of the growth of new energy vehicles, EV, Hybrid EV, Plug-in. Actually, the fastest-growing section is the family vehicles. Growing very fast, actually, growing by more than 80% per year.
Actually, the claims ratio of new energy vehicle is not good. How can we cope with this new development is likely to be a hard question. We need to work on that. We feel that we need to focus more on operation of customers, improving our internal capabilities, enhancing our business development capability through customer operation. We predict with implementation of our reform and transformation measures, we're going to see good results for our P&C business.
Thank you for the question and answer. Let's welcome the next question. Jenny Jiang from Morgan Stanley. Next question come from Liu Xinqi of Guotai Junan Securities.
Thank you. Two q uestion from here about life and business quality of our life business. You see persistency ratio dropped quite a lot. What's the reason? What are you going to do about it? Second, about EV. We see group EV grew quite slowly. Apart from persistency factor, what are the other reasons for the slowdown of growth of EV?
Well, thank you. The first question about the quality of business of life insurance. Well, for CPIC Life, I believe we are not alone in facing this business quality issue. Now, I believe there are three reasons. Number one, I believe that's a legacy issue. We had a lot of agents, recruited a lot of agents. Some of the business is poor in terms of quality. Secondly, the COVID-19 and economic slowdown means actually affordability or some of our customers can no longer afford the product. Thirdly, reputation issue. For example, there is some kind of illegal surrender practices on the market and some other media coverage, negative reporting of life insurance.
These three reasons are exactly the reason why we launched the Changhang Action Plan. To improve our agent team, to focus on business quality, to focus on quality recruitment, quality agents. I believe this action plan will produce good results. As the regulator focus more on protecting consumer rights, the whole industry is taking integrity, good service more seriously. I believe the industry, the regulators, and practitioners, when we all work harder, the life insurance sector in China will win customers' trust with good solutions and good services. We're going to win their trust. This short-term setback is actually a good thing for long-term growth of life insurance in China. Secondly, about EV. Now embedded value, of course, is related to business quality. Now for us, for CPIC, first of all, we focus on New Business Value.
We focus on the growth of new business value, on meeting customers' needs, and focusing on business quality, focusing on improving efficiency. Also improve productivity to drive up EV.
If I may, I'm Zhang Yuanhan, Chief Actuary. On EV issue, you see in 2021, our EV growth slowed down. That's because on the one hand, for 2020, we issued the GDRs. That actually contributed 2.2 percentage points to the EV. If we exclude that, then our EV growth would be 5.5%. This year, our number is 3.3%. There's a gap of 2%. Why the 2%? That's mainly because of the new business value. You see for the whole year, our EV growth is 16%. For this year's growth, actually, the basis is shrinking, but the new business value is not there. Secondly, investment. Investment is also quite a big factor. Also there is a surrender, that is the operational experience variance. That's also a big factor in the calculation of EV.
Thank you. Let's welcome the next question. Our next is Jenny Jiang from Morgan Stanley.
Thank you. I'm Jenny from Morgan Stanley. Two questions from me. Number one, for Chairman Kong. Number one, about dividend payment payout. Net profit and the OPAT are showing quite a difference. What was your dividend strategy for this year? Secondly, for Mr. Cai. What's your view? What targets or Key Performance Indicators are you focusing on? What do you care most about? Is it productivity or income of agents, et cetera? Thank you.
Of course, investors should care about dividend payout. That's the most natural thing to do. For CPIC, in terms of our dividend, I would say CPIC is quite generous.
Our dividend payout ratio is close to 50%. That is to say, for a long time, especially since the eighth or ninth board of directors, we care very much about the payment or dividend payout to shareholders. Actually, we have been called generous in terms of dividend payout. Of course, dividend shall be based on healthy growth. We shall return to shareholders as much as possible based on healthy growth of our business. Of course, we should work hard to do that if more conditions allow. Now, I believe CPIC Group will maintain continuity of our dividend strategy. Of course, we should also take into consideration about our business operation, our business requirement, and also considering regulatory requirements so as to set a proper level of dividend payout.
Well, I would like to pay you more, pay out more, but we need to focus also on long-term sustainable development of the company. For example, lot of innovation initiatives and also becoming more customer-oriented. Well, I'm not sure if you are satisfied with my answer.
Thank you for the second question. You see, for the next six to 12 months, what I care most about in terms of KPI, that would be about, not the headcount, but the heading or the productivity. In the past, we'd only talk about the number of agents, eight million agents, et cetera. I would say active agents or high-performing agents, they are the key. I mean, not the total number of agents. We should focus on active agents and high-performing agents. Secondly, I would also focus on productivity.
I'm very happy to see that in the first half of this year, per capita first year income increased by more than 40%. The monthly average FYC, first year commission, also increased by 15%. Now these two indicators are very good, are pointing to the right direction. We need to keep improving our agent income and our agent productivity. Thirdly, I would also care very much about our customers. That is to say, in the short term, we would use Net Promoter Score as a KPI. Actually for the long run, I would say in two to three years time, we should measure the rate of repeat buy, repeat purchase. Because they not only vote with their foot, but also vote with their hand, vote with their money.
If the average customer only has one policy from CPIC, then this is just a purchaser of your policy of insurance. We would want our customers to become repeat customers. We'd like to increase the number of policies held by each customer.
Well, given the interest of time, we can only have time for one last question for telephone questions. The next question from Li Jianping of Sino-Link Securities.
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question about Mr. Cai, that's the agency channel of CPIC Life. I know you have a lot of experience in life sector, and you have a strong track record. What would you say about the challenges today compared to the difficulties of 10 years ago? I mean, are they comparable? Are they the same? Also about the reform of agency channel.
As you mentioned, we should become more professional, higher quality. Are you going to develop a premium agency team? Are you going to segregate between these? Are you going to have different teams to serve different segment of customers? My second question is to Mr. Zhang Yuanhan, Chief Actuary of the CPIC, about the OPAT, which grew by around 7%, but of course slower than last year. What was the composition of it? Is it because of operation experience variance or spread or interest rate spread, et cetera? What's the contributor?
Well, thank you for your first question. Now, I worked for AIA 10 years ago. Now, there are similarities and differences. Now, in terms of similarities, I would say it's because of the time and the people and place. It's not a single event. There is no silver bullet to change it all.
I believe at that time, we were still having the financial crisis, AIA a ctually were undergoing a big challenge. They need to change, they need to transform. Today, environment is different. Of course, there are difficulty, there are challenges from the life sector as a whole. The differences is Number one, CPIC is a very big insurance company in China in terms of both the volume, and also in terms of our geographic coverage, and also in terms of our product mix, and our business scope. CPIC is much bigger than AIA. I've been with CPIC for six months, and I visit a lot of branches and outlets. I talk to a lot of people in CPIC. I believe we have three u nique strengths or treasure jewels. As I mentioned, we have a big team of agents.
Our agency channel have been doing a lot of the right things for many years. We have accumulated a lot of good people, good agents. Secondly, we have a huge number of customers. Thirdly, our employees. CPIC employees are very hardworking, and many of our managers are high-quality people. We need to utilize our good people. Another difference is the resource. CPIC have totally different resources from AIA, because CPIC is a top player in China, and also a state-owned enterprise. We can utilize a lot of resources. I would say there are both similarities and differences between CPIC now and AIA then. One thing is for sure, we should start from customer needs and become more professional, more specialized via transformation.
Now, I'll answer your second question regarding OPAT.
For the first half of last year, given the COVID-19 pandemic, medical claims were quite low. This year, there was a resurge of claims. You see last year's OPAT was quite high, so there's a high basis. In terms of RM, release of RM, and operational experience variance, these two were on the upside. OPAT gave us good results. As you mentioned, the EV, operation experience variance for EV. Now you see there's quite a surrender cases this year. The calculation is different, because EV not only contain this period, but also long-term operational variance. For OPAT, they only calculate the release or the increase of the release of RM. Of course, other operation experience variance are improving.
Well, thank you. Actually, as I mentioned, we solicited questions from small and medium investors, and we have collected quite a lot of questions.
These are mainly focused on the dividend payout strategy. Secondly, life agency transformation and also P&C auto reform. I believe we have already covered most of them. We are seeing quite a lot of questions on the broadcasting platform. Actually, we'd like Ms. Pan to answer one question. This is a question about the Huimin Bao, or the city-specific health insurance product. A lot of people are benefiting from this insurance, but will it negatively affect CPIC's commercial health insurance?
Thank you. This is really a popular question. Actually starting from last year, we see in a lot of cities in China, there's this kind of affordable medical insurance for the public, and the CPIC has been an active participant of the whole initiative. The Huimin Bao is affordable medical insurance for the general public. You see, premium is quite low.
It's for the mass market, its medical reimbursement. It's like a supplementary medical insurance to the social medical insurance of China. That's its positioning. Of course, that will help improve the awareness of Chinese people for health insurance. For the business side, since it's affordable medical insurance, it's different from a critical illness product from CPIC. It's not a replacement of CI products, but a supplement to CI. They can choose to buy both of them, especially for high- and mid-end customers. They have a very big demand for long-term CI products. This kind of a Huimin Bao or city-specific affordable healthcare health insurance is actually a very good opportunity for further developing commercial health insurance. Going forward, we're going to offer more differentiated solutions to different market segments in terms of health insurance. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Pan.
We have a second question from Ms. Lu. The question asked is that CPIC actually is a very prudent investor. This year you see your results for your investment return is lower than your peers. Why? Which is very stable and prudent. Now, since in the interest of time, actually, we need to end the Q&A session. If you have more questions, you can take it offline after the event. You can contact our IR team. This concludes our interim results announcement. Thank you for your attention.