Ping An Good Doctor: Difficulty Breaking Transfusion Dependency

Text | Old Fish

Editor | Yang Xuran

Ping An Good Doctor, a subsidiary of Ping An Group, is currently experiencing a “performance and market value contradiction.”

In the first three quarters of last year, Ping An Good Doctor delivered a seemingly steady and improving report card: total revenue of 3.725 billion yuan, up 13.6% year-on-year; net profit of 184 million yuan, up 72.6%; adjusted net profit of 216 million yuan, up 45.7%.

Based on this trend, it is highly likely to achieve continuous profitability for the second consecutive year and set a new record for best performance in history.

Operational data during the Spring Festival also painted a busy service scene: during the holiday, daily average user consultations on the Ping An Good Doctor platform increased by nearly 70% year-on-year, and offline medical assistance visits increased by 29%.

However, the cold response from the capital market has poured cold water on this “prosperity.”

Since September 2025, the stock price of Ping An Good Doctor has been continuously declining, with a total drop of over 50% to date. Although many Hong Kong stocks are also falling, this decline ranks among the top.

Ping An Good Doctor’s stock performance (from September 2025 to now)

This makes people realize that what the market worries about may not lie in those impressive operational data and performance reports.

This article is a deep value analysis from the “JuChao WAVE” content team. Follow us on multiple platforms.

01 Profitability

Ping An Good Doctor’s “noble birth” is impressive — it is now the flagship healthcare platform under Ping An Group.

Founded in 2014, riding the wave of internet healthcare, Ping An Good Doctor was launched. On May 4, 2018, it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, issuing 160 million shares and raising HKD 8.564 billion, setting a record for the largest IPO in Hong Kong that year, attracting widespread attention.

Since then, Ping An Good Doctor soared, with a market value reaching as high as HKD 160 billion.

However, after the hype, came a long nine-year loss journey, during which market confidence in the company was gradually eroded. Its stock price once fell to a historic low of HKD 3, with a market cap shrinking by over 90%.

The turning point appeared in 2024. Ping An Good Doctor decisively abandoned its inefficient consumer-end (C-end) money-burning model, fully integrated into Ping An Group’s ecosystem, and shifted focus to the F-end (comprehensive financial client) and B-end (enterprise). This strategic shift was praised as a “breakthrough” and became a key turning point for the company to escape losses and turn profitable.

The so-called F-end refers to Ping An Insurance’s core high-value customer base — mostly users with strong payment ability and urgent health needs, the most critical target group in healthcare services. The B-end business focuses on corporate clients reached through Ping An’s channels, mainly large and medium-sized enterprises with strong payment capacity and willingness, providing tailored comprehensive health management solutions for their employees.

The effect was immediate. 2024 was a significant year for Ping An Good Doctor — it finally broke its nine-year loss streak, achieving its first full-year profit, with a net profit of 81 million yuan and an adjusted net profit of 158 million yuan, ending its long history of losses.

This hard-won achievement rekindled market expectations for Ping An Good Doctor and fueled its stock price rebound.

From September 2024 to September 2025, the stock price rose from the historic low of HKD 3.185 to HKD 24.4, an increase of 666%.

In 2025, Ping An Good Doctor maintained its momentum, with continued growth in performance. As of mid-2025, the number of paying users on the F-end reached about 20 million, up 34.6% year-on-year; the number of service-paying corporate clients exceeded the number of employees, barely turning a profit through “cost control.”

The 2024 annual report showed that sales expenses decreased by 8.6 percentage points year-on-year, management expenses dropped by 37.2 percentage points, and R&D expenses decreased by 29.2 percentage points. The reduction in staff was even more striking: in 2021, Ping An Good Doctor had 4,561 employees; by the end of 2024, the staff size had shrunk to 1,563.

In summary, over three years, employee numbers decreased by 65.73%. In 2024 alone, staff was reduced by 1,862, a 54.3% decline year-on-year.

This “cost-cutting exceeds revenue growth” phenomenon persisted into last year. In the first half of 2024, Ping An Good Doctor’s revenue grew by 19.5% year-on-year, while sales expenses only increased by 3.9%, R&D expenses remained almost flat (up 0.2%), and management expenses decreased by over 5%.

The significant reduction in expenses directly lowered operational costs and laid the foundation for profitability.

The company’s public explanation was that “the reduction in sales expenses benefited from improved channel advantages and high customer renewal rates, while the decline in management expenses was due to AI process restructuring and digital operation deepening.”

But in reality, industry insiders and analysts recognize that this typical cost-cutting approach to achieve profit also inevitably reduces R&D capabilities and service quality.

02 Dependence

Besides unstable profitability, the biggest “instability” of Ping An Good Doctor lies in its high dependence on Ping An Group’s ecosystem, with severely limited independent survival ability.

Since its inception, Ping An Good Doctor has relied heavily on resources from its parent company, Ping An Group — whether in user acquisition or revenue sources, the dependence has been extraordinary.

Half-year reports show that Ping An Good Doctor’s revenue from Ping An Group exceeds 700 million yuan, a 58% increase year-on-year, accounting for nearly 30% of total revenue. Of course, this is only direct revenue; indirect benefits are even larger.

As of June 2025, revenue from Ping An Group’s F-end clients reached 1.433 billion yuan, up 28.5%; B-end revenue was 527 million yuan, up 35.2%. Together, these accounted for 78.3% of total revenue.

This means nearly 80% of Ping An Good Doctor’s income depends on the internal ecosystem of Ping An Group.

The greater resource tilt from China Ping An began last year with the “comprehensive finance + healthcare and elderly care” dual-driven strategy.

To support this new strategy, Ping An Good Doctor even announced a dividend worth over HKD 10 billion in December 2024. That year, it only achieved its first profit — net profit attributable to the parent was just 81.43 million yuan, with accumulated losses reaching 7.133 billion yuan by the end of 2024.

China Ping An increased its stake through “stock-for-dividends,” raising its shareholding from 39.41% to 52.74%, achieving absolute control, and consolidating Ping An Good Doctor into its financial statements.

On the surface, China Ping An’s individual customer base is close to 250 million, while Ping An Good Doctor’s penetration of F-end customers accounts for only 8% of Ping An’s total individual customers, and B-end enterprise coverage is only 5%. There seems to be huge room for growth.

But in reality, this over-reliance puts Ping An Good Doctor in a passive position — if the parent company shifts its strategic focus or cuts resources again, Ping An Good Doctor’s business could suffer a heavy blow, and such a scenario is not impossible.

This concern is not unfounded. China Ping An itself faces significant industry competition, and whether it can continue to “feed” Ping An Good Doctor remains uncertain.

According to the Tonghuashun financial database, in the first three quarters of 2025, China Life, New China Life, PICC, and China Pacific Insurance’s net profits attributable to the parent grew 60.5%, 58.9%, 28.9%, and 19.3%, respectively, while China Ping An’s net profit was 132.856 billion yuan, up only 11.5% year-on-year, far below its peers.

Currently, most of Ping An Good Doctor’s medical services are provided as “additional benefits” attached to Ping An insurance products to enhance their attractiveness. Essentially, it’s a form of “service gifting” that has not truly formed its own value loop.

If China Ping An faces performance pressure and needs to “cut the tail to survive,” Ping An Good Doctor is very likely to be that “tail.”

03 Independence

In China Ping An’s strategic plan, Ping An Good Doctor has a clear development goal — as the flagship of Ping An Group’s healthcare and elderly care ecosystem, aiming to emulate UnitedHealth’s Optum in the U.S., creating a new model of HMO-managed healthcare insurance in China.

HMO, or “Health Maintenance Organization,” means the insurance company not only handles post-treatment reimbursements but also coordinates various medical resources and participates in health management before illness occurs, achieving full-process cost control.

Under this model, insured individuals can enjoy comprehensive medical services within an exclusive network, and insurers can reduce costs through early health management, while also guiding medical institutions toward optimized diagnosis and treatment, creating a win-win situation.

A crucial premise for this model is that the insurance company must occupy an important position in the entire medical payment system to coordinate and lead the process.

But in China, the dominant payer in healthcare is the medical insurance fund, not commercial insurance.

For example, in 2024, data from the National Financial Regulatory Administration shows that commercial health insurance payouts were about 403.78 billion yuan, while the total expenditure of the national medical insurance fund was 2.9676 trillion yuan. This means medical insurance expenditure is more than seven times that of commercial insurance.

This reality determines that Ping An Good Doctor’s relationship with hospitals is merely a simple cooperation — it has no management rights or voice, cannot truly influence doctors’ diagnoses, nor effectively control medical costs.

Therefore, the so-called “HMO model” promoted by Ping An Good Doctor can only stay at the promotional level and is difficult to implement in practice. It’s also quite possible that Ping An Group might stop supporting Ping An Good Doctor heavily, which is a key reason.

Unable to truly help insurance companies “control costs,” Ping An Good Doctor can only focus more on medical services. Data shows that it has proposed a “four-scene” service system covering online consultation, offline medical treatment, corporate services, and home care.

But in practice, these services often become superficial “window dressing,” providing little real value to users. More importantly, these seemingly considerate services are easy for large insurers, medical institutions, and financial institutions to replicate, leading to fierce competition and higher operational costs:

• Online consultation currently only handles minor symptoms like colds and fevers, mainly for online drug purchases, and cannot match the in-person “inspection, listening, questioning, and palpation.”
• Offline medical assistance usually offers basic services like appointment registration and accompaniment, with high substitutability, and cannot influence hospital diagnosis and treatment processes or connect users to better, more efficient medical resources.
• B-end enterprise services mainly include routine health checkups, expert consultations, medical assistance, and convenient drug purchasing.

These services are highly homogeneous in the market, difficult to develop core competitive advantages, and may even lead to service quality issues due to heavy operation and low entry barriers.

Currently, on the Black Cat Complaint platform, there are over 3,000 complaints about Ping An Good Doctor, mainly about refund difficulties and inadequate service.

For Ping An Good Doctor, two years of profitability have not solved its core lack of competitiveness, which is the fundamental reason for its continued heavy reliance on the parent company.

If these issues cannot be fundamentally addressed, this “noble-born” enterprise will always struggle to be truly independent. Even if Ping An uses unlimited financial resources to solve surface problems, the core position of healthcare in the insurance ecosystem means that all healthcare product prosperity is built on a fundamentally weak foundation.

Author’s note: Personal opinions only, for reference.