From 5% to 15%, why does Ping An repeatedly buy China Life?

On May 28, Ping An Life announced that it had entrusted Ping An Asset Management to invest in China Life H shares, and on May 20, its holdings reached 15% of the China Life H shares, triggering a disclosure of major shareholding.

This is the third time within a year that Ping An Life has disclosed a major shareholding in China Life H shares.

Previously, Ping An Life triggered two disclosures in August 2025 and February 2026 respectively, after its shareholding reached 5% and 10%.

As of May 20, Ping An Life held China Life H shares with a book balance of 29.357 billion yuan, accounting for 0.51% of total assets at the end of last quarter, and the source of funds is insurance liability reserves.

From the transaction trajectory, this was not a one-off purchase, but a nearly ten-month systematic increase.

On May 18, China Ping An, via Ping An Life, increased its holdings by 56.75 million shares of China Life H shares on the market, with an average price per share of about HK$29.60, spending about HK$1.68 billion. After the increase, the Ping An group held a total of about 1.126 billion shares of China Life H shares, accounting for 15.13% of the total H shares.

So far this year, Ping An group has cumulatively bought over 400 million shares of China Life H shares.

In fact, since the first disclosure in August 2025, Ping An's increase in China Life H shares has hardly stopped. In less than a year, its shareholding rose from less than 5% to above 15%, with the pace of increase even faster than its allocation of some bank stocks.

The market is more concerned with the question: why is Ping An continuously buying China Life?

If considering high dividends alone, Ping An has plenty of choices.

In recent years, Ping An has also disclosed major shareholding in Agricultural Bank of China, Postal Savings Bank, China Merchants Bank, China Taiping, and other financial institution H shares. In contrast, three consecutive disclosures in the same insurance company are rare in Ping An's recent investment portfolio.

From the perspective of insurance asset allocation logic, China Life H shares have multiple features: high dividends, low valuations, and suitability for long-term holding.

In recent years, under a low-interest environment, insurance funds face significant asset allocation pressure.

On the one hand, traditional fixed-income asset yields continue to decline;

On the other hand, insurance liabilities have long durations and need to find long-term assets capable of providing stable cash flows. Compared to chasing highly volatile growth stocks, high-dividend financial stocks better meet the requirements for stable returns and asset-liability matching.

As one of the leading domestic life insurers, China Life has maintained a high dividend level over the long term;

Meanwhile, its H shares have been valued lower than A shares, and are relatively undervalued in the Hong Kong stock market. For life insurance funds with liability cycles over ten years, this type of asset not only provides sustained dividends, but also offers potential for value recovery.

More importantly, under the new accounting standards, the asset allocation logic for insurance funds is changing.

The market generally believes that compared to pursuing short-term capital gains, insurance institutions prefer assets that can be held long-term, offer stable dividends, and have profits with relatively controllable volatility. China Life H shares exactly meet these requirements.

To some extent, Ping An is not just buying China Life's dividend yield, but also betting on the long-term fundamental recovery of the insurance industry.

At the industry level, the insurance sector is now seeing an interesting phenomenon—insurance funds are starting to frequently increase their holdings in peer companies.

In the first quarter of this year, China Life increased its holdings in China Ping An A shares by over 43 million shares;

At the same time, New China Life Insurance bought over 19 million shares of China People Insurance H shares;

Ping An Life has been continuously increasing its holdings in China Life H shares, China Taiping H shares, and other insurance stocks.

Behind this phenomenon, an internal dividend cycle is forming within the insurance industry.

Compared to more volatile sectors like real estate and new energy, insurance stocks have characteristics such as clear business models, stable dividends, ample liquidity, and a large market capitalization. Additionally, insurance institutions inherently have a better understanding of their peers’ business models and risk profiles, making it easier to make long-term value judgments.

For life insurance funds, these assets not only provide stable cash flows, but also allow them to benefit from value recovery as industry conditions improve, making them a key direction of insurance funds’ equity allocations in recent years.

It is worth noting that Ping An's management has previously publicly explained the logic behind frequent disclosures of major shareholding.

At its earnings conference, the management of China Ping An said that the core of its investment strategy is asset-liability matching—not simply chasing short-term investment returns, but finding suitable assets to meet long-term liability needs.

From this perspective, Ping An's continued increase of China Life H shares appears more like a long-term allocation decision, rather than a short-term trading action.

In the era of low interest rates, the focus of insurance equity investing is shifting from seeking capital gains to pursuing long-term stable returns.

As regulators continue to encourage medium- and long-term capital to enter the market, financial blue-chip stocks with high dividends, low valuations, and asset-liability matching as core traits are likely to remain a key allocation for insurance funds in the future.

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