My name is Ron. I'm the CFO and Head of International Business at Huize. As Anna just introduced myself, I'm actually based in Hong Kong. So if you can see in my background, actually, that's the skyline of Hong Kong at night, which is pretty pretty. So let me get to the main presentation. If I just wanted to switch to my slides here. Okay. So very quick word on the team overall. So we are one of the earliest innovators in the digital distribution space in China. We are very much focused on creating a consumer-facing platform that connects the consumers to the insurance companies digitally. So we are the first company to do so in the China market. And our team combines international and also local experience in leading insurance and financial institutions.
So our founder and CEO, he actually was a Ping An salesperson in his early career. So Ping An is actually the Fortune 500 company in China in the insurance sector. So Andy, he spent 10 years at Ping An. And then in 2006, he came out and founded this company. The genesis of this company was to create, again, a platform that helps consumers find the right product in insurance. And at the same time, connect insurance companies through an online platform to reach the mass market efficiently. So Andy created this company in 2006. And over the last 18 years, we have innovated along the way. We have constantly adapted to changing consumer preferences and behavior.
We have come through from the early days where we are purely just a simple website, whereby we provide various different insurance products for consumers to compare, thereby solving some pain points, especially in terms of transparency in the terms and pricings and comparisons across different products, helping consumers find the best product for themselves. Again, on the insurance side, because back in those days, it was very hard for insurance companies to really efficiently reach out to the massive consumer market. With our platform, we're able to help bridge the two sides of the market in a very efficient manner. In around 2015, we have changed our model from a website-based platform to a social media-driven kind of platform. We are leveraging on the uprise of social media marketing in China, particularly with respect to various social media channels.
Obviously, these days, we talk about live streaming and also short video, long video platforms, where we are able to help drive insurance sales through content-driven marketing to reach the consumers, to enable them to realize the insurance protection requirements. It's also very much a way to adapt to the changing consumer behavior for the Gen X and Gen Ys, because the millennials these days are more fundamentally purchasing insurance on their own accord. They're no longer that receptive to cold calling or hard sales from insurance agents. On the contrary, they're more naturally inclined to form their own opinions by reaching out to relevant content on the internet. By way of our social media-driven content marketing, we are able to reach the eyeballs of the average consumer in the right context and in the form that is suitable for these consumers.
So with this leveraging on the social media, we have massively scaled our business portfolio and volumes. Ultimately, we are able to reach a scale enabling us to list on the Nasdaq market. So on the rest of the team members, obviously, myself, I started my career at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. And I've been involved with Huize for the last four years since the IPO. We have expanded from just a China business now from the early days to now we are more a Pan-Asian play. Last year, we entered the Hong Kong market in the second half of the year. And then this year, we are proactively expanding to the rest of the Southeast Asia region. And I will touch on this in the later slide. So this is our overall business model.
So again, our focus is to connect the various participants in the insurance value chain. On one end is the consumers. On the other hand is the insurance carriers. And in the middle, we serve as an intermediary for a lot of our distribution partners. I mentioned before the social media marketing. And obviously, we work with a lot of influencers to help us reach out to the consumer market. We also work with other financial intermediaries, such as wealth management companies and other professional parties, whereby we enable the monetization of the insurance product for these third parties. So on the right-hand side, you can see some key bullet points on the company's profile. We are now ranked number one independent online life and health insurance distribution platform in China in terms of gross written premiums facilitated on the platform.
We are probably the digitalization partner of choice for many leading insurance carriers. We are connected live to 120+ insurance companies in China and Hong Kong right now, and over 10,000 distribution partners that I just mentioned. We have over 9.3 million policyholders right now, so paying customers who have transacted on our platform in the last 18 years. The customer profile, the demographic is very young. And obviously, there's a very high lifetime value potential with respect to this young customer set. Some high-level numbers. Last year, we distributed around $800 million of gross written premiums. We generated around $168 million of revenues. We are profitable. Last year, we generated $10 million of net profit in 2023. Again, last year, we started to embark on our internationalization strategy to expand outside of the China market.
Obviously, Hong Kong is the first market for us to move into. We had a double-digit target for overall revenue contribution from the international market starting from this year. Here is a very quick snapshot of our business lines. We are a direct-to-consumer model. This is very straightforward. We have a web presence. We have mobile apps. We have a social media presence. Also, we do a lot of customer acquisition through traditional search marketing on internet engines, search engines. In the middle is the B2B2C, which is what I alluded to before. We work with a lot of social media channels, third-party channel distributors who help us drive traffic to our platform for conversion into insurance policies. This is a very scalable business model whereby we work on a revenue share basis.
So we don't have to incur upfront customer acquisition costs. Rather, we have a back-ended success fee split with our third-party channel partners. So this is a very scalable part of the business model in the overall ecosystem. And then the third part is a very relatively new business line that we have developed in the last two years, which is called the B2A2C. Essentially, it's a platform that enables the independent financial advisors in the market to sell insurance to the customers. So I think this is very common in the U.S. market or in the default markets in the world, whereby a lot of the insurance distribution is driven by IFAs in the market. I think in the U.S., the proportion of IFA sales is around 50%. In Hong Kong, it's around 30%-50%. And in China right now, it's still relatively low at 5%.
So I think there's a lot of room to grow in this spectrum. The key value proposition that we provide to these IFAs is that we provide a very diversified insurance product matrix. We have from P&C products to life and health products to customized products that we have co-developed with insurance companies. Second, we have a fully digital CRM and underwriting system for the IFAs to leverage on. So basically, they can really focus on discovering and managing their customer relationships and leave the mid and back end to the platform for us to address. So it alleviates and relieves the burden for policy administration and underwriting and claims processing for the IFAs. So here is a very quick profile on the customer base. So as I said before, we have around 9.3 million paying insurance customers on the platform since at the end of last year.
We are having a very young cohort in our platform. You can see the average age of our customer base is around 34 years of age. 66% of our customers come from higher-tier cities in China. This would mean the top 10 or top 20 GDP regions, provinces in China. We target the mass affluent middle-class segment in the China market. On the next slide, we have a very trusted brand in the consumer market because we have a service pledge to promise that all the customers who have bought a policy on our platform, they can be assured that the claims processing will be well supported in the after-sales. Here are some quick numbers here to show the scale of the business volume. In 2023 financial year, we have processed 92,000 claims cases overall. The overall claim settlement amount is CNY 570 million.
So in US dollar terms, that's around $70 million. So it's a very, very sizable sum that we have assisted our customers to claim from the insurers. On the lower right-hand side are some metrics that show the quality of the business. So that's reflected in the persistency ratios that we are able to achieve on our life and health products. These are long-term, 20-year paying products. And on average, we are seeing 95% persistency metrics in the 13th month and the 25th month, respectively. So this is very important for the insurance point of view because we are able to deliver a very high-quality business. And in return, insurers entrust in us to co-develop customized products, which are exclusive to the Huize platform.
So here are some brand names that we work with in the China market as well as in the international market, starting from last year. On the left-hand side, you can see in various product categories, we have product partners in each category. For example, in critical illness, we co-develop customized products for PICC, which is probably one of the preeminent insurance companies in China. On the right-hand side, you see some foreign brand names as well. In Hong Kong, we work with the likes of Manulife X, AIA, Prudential for the Hong Kong business. So in China and also in the international market, we work with top-tier names to deliver the right solutions to our customer set. In terms of technology development, obviously, now we're talking about the AI solutions driving further productivity gains.
I think that in this particular area, we have been deploying meaningful capital to innovate in the AI solution space. Over the last two years, I think we have spent close to CNY 100 million, so around $15 million in developing AI products. We are now proud to say that we have already developed an in-house model whereby the AI engine will be able to help empower customer consultations in terms of intelligent chatbots to address basic Q&As or claims or customer service. Also, we have a product knowledge bank, which enables our consultants to generate product comparisons and proposals very efficiently and to answer technical questions from our customers in a very, very professional manner.
This AI engine, we are also starting to export or enable to the outside IFA market in China, whereby external agents can also leverage on our AI tools, pretty much like a GPT-type product, to help them drive productivity gains in the sales process. So this is manifested in some financial metrics in the lower part of this slide. You can see increasing employee productivity going up from CNY 1.7 million in 2019 to CNY 5.2 million in 2023. That's a very meaningful figure for the last four years. And gross margins have also been improving because we are becoming more and more efficient in acquiring customers and also generating repeat purchases from the existing customer set. Operating leverage, obviously, is also being enhanced by the AI productivity tools that we are able to deliver into our in-house processes.
About the market opportunity, I think obviously, I think China obviously right now is indeed undergoing some macro headwinds. But I think that overall, structurally, the long-term growth trajectory and opportunity is definitely very sizable. If you look at the life insurance density figures in China compared to the U.S., we are still a very small fraction of the U.S. market in terms of life insurance penetration. These numbers are probably one-eighth of the U.S. market right now. So, substantial room for growth. And as I alluded to earlier, the distribution by intermediary brokers just like ourselves is still a very small share of the overall premium distribution in China, 5% in China versus 52% in the U.S. market. And even in Hong Kong, that's 30%. So you're looking at a 6x to 10x growth potential just from the increasing share of the distribution by intermediaries in China.
Coupled with that, the overall TAM market opportunity, which is around one-tenth of the size of the U.S. market. So structurally, there's a very, very long way to go for China. And Hong Kong, obviously, is a new international market from our perspective. Starting from last year, we are able to see substantial growth in this new geographical market. We are seeing the return of mainland Chinese visitors into Hong Kong purchasing offshore insurance products in the Hong Kong market. And you can see in the upper right-hand chart, in 2023, the overall volumes of business in Hong Kong from mainland Chinese visitors have significantly returned to pre-COVID levels. So we are expecting to see this number to grow again in this year. We're seeing continued strong momentum in the Hong Kong market from the Chinese visitors. So I touched upon our overseas expansion plans.
In the next three years, we are targeting double-digit revenue contribution from our international markets. So for international market, we'll mean basically in the short term, Southeast Asia. And in Southeast Asia, we like a few markets, which is highlighted here in color. Obviously, these are high-growth markets in the GDP context and also a very sizable population base, 100 million people plus in each country that we're targeting in the so-called VIP countries, which are Vietnam, Indonesia, and Philippines. So these three countries are the key target markets for us in the next three years. And we are proactively in dialogue with local partners in terms of M&A opportunities. And our goal is to at least enter into one new international market outside of Hong Kong in the second half of this year.
The opportunity for us in ASEAN is very straightforward because we see a lot of similarities of these markets with China and also notwithstanding the high GDP potential, obviously, very low penetration insurance and very high usage of social media and digital savviness of the general population. These demographics are very young as well. These are all the right ingredients for us to replicate what we have successfully built out in China into these ASEAN markets. We are very confident that our model in China will work in these selected countries. We are going to be very aggressive in pursuing these market opportunities in the next three years. I'll close with two main financial metrics here on the company's financials. Improving profitability, we have been profitable consistently for the last five quarters. We are having a very strong liquidity position.
At the end of last year, we are sitting on around $30+ million of cash. So we are very much well funded to pursue M&A opportunities in the ASEAN market, as I just mentioned. So these are the summary highlights on the investment highlights. I'm probably not going to repeat this one as I have covered most of these points already in the main content. Some market information for the audience, we are right now covered by three analysts. So Citi is a house bank. They have managed the IPO for us. CICC is the preeminent Chinese investment bank. And UOB Kay Hian is one of the leading investment banks and brokers in the Southeast Asia market. Right now, we are around $40 million of market cap. As I said, we have a cash balance of $39 million.
So we would like to say we are very undervalued right now due to, I guess, market dislocations. And we believe that the investment opportunity and thesis here is very sound. And we are very excited to be here to talk about our story. And we look forward to continued connectivity with the US market in the future. So that will be my main content. And thanks. Back to you, Anna, for Q&A.
Great. Thank you so much for your presentation, Ron. We do have some questions for you. Ki Woo Chen asks or says, "You always emphasize that long-term insurance premiums account for a huge proportion, and the renewal rate is also huge. But I don't see the total premiums accumulating, increasing. It seems to fluctuate." So can you explain the reason?
Right. Well, I think the total premiums have been growing. I can go back to a slide that I have shown before. This is the slide here. On the lower right-hand side, you can see the breakdown of our premiums into first-year premiums, which is new business, and renewal premiums, which is renewals of existing policies. The yellow bar, you can see, is consistently increasing. That is a reflection of the continued renewals of our customers in the long-term life policies. That's also shown by the persistency metrics of 95%. There will be some fluctuations when some of the policies fall off from the renewals because some of these policies are 5-year paying. Some of these policies are 3-year paying. Therefore, there might be some short-term fluctuations when some of these vintages fall off from the renewal curve.
Thank you for that. Jamie Silva wants you to go back over some of how you're matching your consumers, asking, "Are you only matching consumers with life insurance? And is it only in Hong Kong? Or are you expanding to other demographics and products?"
Right. So our main business portfolio is still in China up to last year. But now we are aggressively growing our overseas revenues and business. So as of the first quarter of this year, we have already disclosed our quarterly numbers in Q1. So our international revenue contribution is already 7% of overall revenues. So still 93% is China, right? And we match our customers to many different products. But our focus really is in the high-value life and health products. So the average ticket size for these products, as I've shown in this slide, is CNY 4,300 per ticket.
So in US dollar terms, that's around $600 per ticket. So these are life and health policies, your critical illness, your medical insurance, savings insurance products.
And Jacob asks, "How do you decide what products to offer or match? Are you offered incentives by insurance companies?"
So the way that we acquire customers, again, is through content marketing because that's how the youngsters nowadays like to consume information. So in China, everyone's on a mobile phone. They do payments on the mobile. They do everything on the mobile, right? So we have to reach to these customers on the mobile phone, right? So by way of content marketing, we disseminate insurance product information on the YouTube of China. So that will be the TikTok of China, Douyin, right? So live streaming channels as well where a professional insurance agent will talk about insurance live.
And then consumers will find questions in the chat box. And then that will be diverted into a platform for consultation and conversion. So basically, the consumer would find the right content. And when they reach our platform for conversion, they would have already formed some kind of preliminary view of what product they would like to consume. So that's how we acquire customers in our business.
And Dom Estrada asks, "What's the cost to get a customer? And do you have recurring revenue from them?"
Yes. So because we generate renewal premiums, so we have renewal revenue from the renewals of these customers on the long-term policies. So the commission rates, obviously, it's more tilted towards the first-year premium payments. And we still get continued renewal premiums commissions in the second to fifth year, depending on the product category. So for some products, we get five years.
For some products, we get 3 years. For some products, we only get 2 years.
Blanche asks, "Do you underwrite your own products? Or are you interested in doing that?" We currently do not underwrite. We mainly just distribute on the behalf of insurers. But we have not purely been just a distribution platform because, as I alluded to earlier, we have accumulated 18 years of transaction data on the platform. Thereby, we are able to enable product design capability back to the insurers because we have a very good data set. We are able to harness the data set by analytics. And therefore, we can find out the latest consumer preferences on product features. And with this insight and intel, we go back to insurers and propose product ideas. And for this co-development of products, we are able to enjoy exclusivity marketing rights on these products.
We do not underwrite these products.
Vernon asks, "How has life insurance been faring with inflation? Other premiums have risen. But is life insurance remaining affordable?"
Good question. I think in China, interestingly, we are not in a very inflationary environment due to the macro headwinds. Unlike in the U.S., in the Western world, where inflation is pretty persistent, in China, we do see the supply side being quite abundant. And therefore, we are seeing very modest inflationary pressures on the overall market and also for insurance. We don't really have that issue in China right now.
Well, Ron, thank you so much. Do you have any closing remarks for our viewers today?
Sure. Well, thanks, Anna. And thanks for having us on this conference. It's very exciting to present to the U.S. audience. We would like to be kept in constant dialogue with the U.S. market going forward. We look forward to the next conference. Again, thanks to the organizer for this.
Wonderful. Glad you were here. We look forward to having you on with future updates. Have a great rest of your evening.
Okay. Thank you, Anna. Goodbye.
All right, everyone, stay with us. We'll be right back with our next presenter.