China's biggest life and nonlife insurers have said they will look to strike a balance in 2019 between growth in value and expansion in scale, after losing market share in 2018.

China Life Insurance Co. Ltd.'s market share by total premium income dropped to 17.3% from 18.2% year over year, while nearest rival Ping An Life Insurance Co. of China Ltd. grew to 16.2% of the market from 14.4%, according to statistics from the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

The drop in China Life's market share was mainly attributable to an 18.9% year-over-year decline in premium income from what the CBIRC terms "income from policyholders' investment accounts," referring to policies with few of the protective features commonly associated with insurance.

Such policies have been the target of a string of rules and regulations to promote protection-oriented life insurance products, following which China Life saw premiums fall in early 2018 as wealth management-style life insurance products became less attractive than offerings from banks. The company has since adjusted its product mix toward the policies that the regulator prefers, and it generated a small year-over-year rise in full-year premium income.

Wang Bin, chairman of China Life and parent China Life Insurance (Group) Co., said in January that during 2019, the life insurer will "accelerate the transformation ... from scale-driven [development] to organically integrate value and scale [growth]."

China Life offered both protection and savings-type products in the 2019 kickoff sales, the period around the Lunar New Year that has historically been a major driver of full-year revenue for the country's insurers. It was a savings product, offering an assumed interest rate of 4.025%, that proved popular among customers, however, as China Life's first-year premium rose around 90% year over year in January, Chinese media reported.

At Ping An Life, by contrast, January first-year premium fell roughly 20%.

In 2018, premium growth at New China Life Insurance Co. Ltd. and other listed Chinese insurers' life insurance subsidiaries, including China Pacific Life Insurance Co. Ltd. and Taiping Life Insurance Co. Ltd., generally outperformed the segment. One exception was People's Insurance Co. (Group) of China Ltd.'s PICC Life Insurance Co. Ltd., which struggled to undergo transformation to pursue new business value growth.

"Some companies used to gain market share with low new-business-value products," said Felix Luo, a Hong Kong-based analyst at China Merchants Securities (HK) Co. Ltd. "But ultimately, [the financial market] will look at their new business value growth."

PICC Property & Casualty Co. Ltd., meanwhile, maintained its status as China's biggest nonlife insurer by far, with its market share of 33.0% exceeding the combined share of second- and third-placed Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Co. of China Ltd. and China Pacific Property Insurance Co. Ltd. The trio between themselves controlled some 64% of the nonlife market at the end of 2018, a rise of about half a percentage point compared to 2017.

In January, PICC President Bai Tao said management targets for the group's subsidiaries in 2019 include steady growth and a stable market share, while Chairman Miao Jianmin said the group would demand high-quality growth.

Elsewhere, China Continent P&C Insurance Co. Ltd., which is owned by China Reinsurance (Group) Corp., replaced China United Property Insurance Co. Ltd. as the fifth-largest Chinese nonlife insurer. Digital insurer ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance Co. Ltd.'s premium income grew 88.4% year over year in 2018, far outstripping the 11.5% sector average, and it has risen from 24th to 12th in terms of market share over the past two years alone. However, its share still amounts to less than 1% of what remains a highly concentrated market.

As of Feb. 13, US$1 was equivalent to 6.76 Chinese yuan.