Thank you for standing by for Fanhua's first quarter and first half 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Please follow the instructions given at that time if you would like to ask a question. For your information, this conference call is now being broadcasted live over the internet. Webcast replay will be available within 3 hours after the conference is finished. Please visit Fanhua's IR website at ir.fanhuaholdings.com under the events and webcasts section. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'd like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's conference, Ms. Oasis Qiu, Fanhua's Investor Relations Manager.
Good morning and good evening. Welcome to our second quarter and first half 2021 earnings conference call. The earnings were released earlier today and are available on our IR website as well as on Newswire. Before we continue, please know that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The accuracy of this statement may be impacted by a number of business risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those outlined in our filings with the SEC, including our registration statement on Form 20-F. We do not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information except as required under applicable law.
Joining us today are our Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, Mr. Chunlin Wang, Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Peng Ge, and Board Secretary, Lily Li. Mr. Wang will provide a review of our financial and operational highlights in the second quarter and first half of 2021. There will be a Q&A session after the prepared remarks. I will turn the call over to Mr. Wang. Good morning and good evening. Thank you for participating in today's conference call. On the first part, I will talk about our views on the market trends. Firstly, the resurgence of COVID-19 has brought a far-reaching impact on China's economy and business activities, directly or indirectly hurting consumer confidence and purchasing power of the middle-class families. Many industries have been drastically impacted, the insurance industry was certainly not immune. Even so, we are firm believers that challenges and opportunities coexist.
We still believe that there is tremendous room waiting to be explored in China's life insurance market in the long run, and that professional insurance intermediaries, as an important insurance distribution force, still enjoy huge growth potential. The progress made in the past in the professional insurance intermediary industry was only to lay the foundation for future development, and COVID-19 is expected to speed up the development of the industry. It is inevitable and irreversible that the market share of professional insurance intermediaries will continue to increase.
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Health insurance market is getting saturated and growth is expected to slow down in the next stage. However, with an aging population, the demand of Chinese middle-class families for commercial pension insurance and long-term annuity is expected to continue to grow, and thus opens up a huge blue ocean market. The key to cultivating and meeting such demand is to build a high-quality sales force, gain customer insight through digital intelligence, and provide customers with a variety of customized products according to their individual needs, thus prolonging customer life cycle.
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Fourthly, we firmly believe our strategy of professionalization, digitalization, and open platform will prepare us well to seize the new opportunities emerging from the market changes. Hence, we will stay committed to pushing forward our strategy.
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On the second part, I will give a review of our financial results in the second quarter and first half of 2021.
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Life insurance industry witnessed a sharp decline in total gross written premiums by 16.6% in the second quarter of 2021.
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Against the industry headwind, Fanhua managed to record RMB 2.5 billion worth of total life insurance GWP, representing a positive growth of 4.9% year-over-year, with operating income reaching RMB 51 million, higher than expectation in the second quarter of 2021.
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As compared to only 0.4% year-over-year growth in total life insurance GWP in the industry in the first half of 2021, Fanhua registered RMB 5.5 billion in life insurance premiums, up by 16.9% year-over-year. RMB 191.4 million in operating income, meeting nearly two-thirds of our target for 2021.
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In the third part, I would share the progress that we've made in our strategy of professionalization, digitalization, and open platform strategy. We have made encouraging progress.
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Firstly, in terms of professionalization, we approved the establishment of 14 Yuntong branches, among which 9 are in the preparatory stage for opening. Over 100 Yuntong advisors have been recruited after multiple rounds of rigorous checks and assessments.
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Secondly, in terms of digitalization, we rolled out three major digital tools in the second quarter of 2021, i.e., Digital Asset Management platform, Rong360 Digital Operations platform, and Rong360 管家. The key value of using these digital tools is in helping team leaders with managing teams more efficiently and empowering agents to better engage clients based on data-driven insights and digitalized operations.
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We applied new digital tools in Hebei province on a pilot basis since May, with about 8,000 agents installing our WeCom and over 2,000 registering as digital asset originators and connecting to more than 40,000 clients through WeCom. Such digitized tools and operations have significantly helped mobilize our existing sales force and connected our clients, laying a solid foundation for further team management and client operations.
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Building on our experience in the Hebei pilot zone, we plan to roll out digital tools among our frontline sales force on a wider basis and implementing a new development model to expand our entrepreneurial sales teams, but by digital empowerment. i.e. to digitalize our offline operations to WeCom-based online chat group operation so as to assist our team leaders to manage their team activities more efficiently and professionally, while empowering our agents to better engage with their clients in a professional manner.
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This fourth part is about our business outlook for the third quarter and the second half of 2021.
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We expect our new business for the third quarter of 2021 to grow on a quarter-over-quarter basis, while operating income is expected to be no less than RMB 25 million with increased spending on implementing our Yuntong plan and promotion of digitalization initiatives. In the meantime, we will spare no effort to ramp up sales in the last quarter to achieve our full-year sales target and gear up for the jumpstart sales campaign for 2022. Operating income is expected to exceed RMB 100 million for the second half of 2021, and no less than RMB 300 million for 2021.
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Fifthly, our dividend plan for the second quarter of 2021.
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Our quarterly dividend for the second quarter of 2021 is $0.15 per ADS. The dividend is payable on or around September 23rd, 2021, to shareholders of record on September 7th, 2021.
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Thank you. Now the floor will open for your questions.
Your first question comes from the line of Allen Feng from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question.
[Non English] Good morning management. Just have two quick questions.
First, what is the impact of the so-called double recording practice on offline insurance sales? Secondly, could you just quickly comment on the new sales trend of critical illness products as well as savings type products since the third quarter of this year? Thank you.
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Firstly, from Fanhua's perspective, we welcome this new regulation. We believe that it will help to standardize the operation in the industry and help to reduce malicious policy cancellation and reduce sales misrepresentation. Secondly, short term wise, there may be some adverse impact, but from long term perspective, we believe that the benefits will be much larger than the adverse impact. Thirdly, this regulation will also pose higher requirements for professional insurance intermediaries to standardize their operations, and it will help to improve the quality of the professional insurance intermediary sectors as a whole.
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In the past, as life insurance sales organizations are mostly organized in a pyramid structure, and a lot of the sales agents are actually working as a sales agent on a part-time basis. Not a lot of them have strong abilities in the sales skills. Critical illness, which is relatively easy to sell, became the major product for professional insurance intermediaries. As a result, the penetration rate of critical illness products has been quite high in China.
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Therefore, we expect that the room for further development for critical illness products will be quite limited.
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We believe that the broader market will come from the demand from the 400 million middle class families for diversified family asset allocation solutions.
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Such demand opens up a new blue ocean market. Such demand will also require the services of more professional sales agents who will be able to offer customized products for the clients based on their individual needs.
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Therefore our future market propositions and all our major focus will be to meet the demands of this 400 million middle class for family asset allocation plans.
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Therefore, we are going to actively pursue customer innovation and customer customization, product customization, so as to make sure that in the future, these customized products will account for a majority of our sales.
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On August 26th, we are going to host a new product launch conference for a customized product, a whole life insurance product, which is called Huading Number One. This product will be officially launched to the market in September, which will be our major product in September.
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We already established cooperation agreements with six reinsurance companies. In the future we will work with those reinsurance companies and insurance companies to customize and design products for our customers.
谢谢。
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Zixian Wang. Please ask your question.
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First, congrats to the company and management for the higher than industry growth in the first half. Here are my 2 questions. The first one is about the product mix. What is our current product mix, say the proportion of annuity, critical illness and life insurance? Is there any change compared with the previous year? Next question is about the regional strategy. Which provinces or cities are our main targets and which group of people are our target customers? Thanks.
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By 20-year APE, whole life insurance, critical illness, and annuity represented 49%, 43%, and 6% respectively, compared to 19%, 69%, and 9% respectively in the same period last year. By first year premium, whole life insurance, critical illness, and annuity represented 69%, 20%, and 7% respectively, as compared to 31%, 45%, and 14%.
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Critical illness product as a percentage of our total mix dropped quite significantly. I believe that there were two major factors. Firstly, in the first quarter, there is the transition between the new critical illness definition with the O1. After the transition, we believe that the critical illness products are not as good as the O1. Therefore, the demand for critical illness has weakened after the transition.
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Of course, it will also take time for the savings product to achieve explosive growth.
谢谢。
Thank you.
问一下其他问题了吧。
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to hand conference back to today's presenters. Please continue.
We haven't covered the second question yet. Hold on.
Okay, sure.
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Most of the 400 million middle class families live in urban areas. Therefore, our strategy has always been urbanization and elite salesforce focused. As we mentioned, we are going to implement our digitalization and professionalization strategies, the major market for us to implement this strategy will be the major cities.
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We have 2 strategic priorities. Firstly is the development of entrepreneurial sales teams backed by digital empowerment. We hope that we can attract more and more elite sales agents to join our salesforce. Secondly, the second priority is our Yuntong plans. As we mentioned just now, we have approved 14 Yuntong branches, and we expect to have 25 Yuntong branches by the end of this year.
他们云统分公司主要在北上广深的一线城市和各省会的二线城市，以省会为中心的城市。
These Yuntong branches will be mainly located in first-tier cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, Shenzhen, as well as provincial capital cities.
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So far, we have made a good progress.
谢谢。
Thank you. Hi, Karen.
Yes, there are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the conference back to today's presenters. Please continue.
Thank you for participating in today's conference call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you. Hello, you can conclude this call.
Yes, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.