The first 2025 financial report from a listed insurer is out! Sunshine Insurance's 2025 performance is mixed: life insurance surpasses the 100 billion yuan mark, while property insurance faces pressure with substantial losses in guarantee insurance.

Question: AI · Explosion in bancassurance channels, what challenges does individual insurance transformation face?

【Text / Yushan Guan Jin Studio Li Limeng】

Recently, Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation Limited (Stock code: 06963.HK, hereafter “Sunshine Insurance”) released its full-year performance report as of December 31, 2025. The report shows that Sunshine Insurance achieved a total premium income of 150.72 billion yuan for the year, a 17.4% increase year-over-year; operating revenue reached 94.811 billion yuan, up 5.03%; net profit attributable to the parent company was 6.307 billion yuan, a 15.75% increase. Notably, the per-share dividend remained unchanged at 0.19 yuan for 2024 and 2025, without adjusting for profit growth.

The 2025 performance was mixed, with clear distinctions. On one hand, life insurance achieved total premium income of 102.61 billion yuan, surpassing the 100 billion yuan mark; on the other hand, the property and casualty (P&C) business underperformed significantly compared to the group’s overall level, with guaranteed insurance underwriting losses reaching 1.51 billion yuan.

Life insurance shows strong resilience in value growth, while P&C faces significant pressure with huge guaranteed insurance losses

From the financial data, Sunshine Insurance’s overall operations in 2025 remained steady, with embedded value reaching 120.78 billion yuan, a 4.3% increase from the end of the previous year; the average return on equity (ROE) was 10.62%, up 1.82 percentage points year-over-year, indicating steady improvement in asset efficiency. In terms of cash flow, net cash flow from operating activities was 64.316 billion yuan, a surge of 97.27% year-over-year.

Sunshine Life undoubtedly served as the “pillar” of this performance. In 2025, Sunshine Life achieved total premium income of 102.61 billion yuan, a 27.5% increase. Even more noteworthy, the new business value (NBV) reached 7.64 billion yuan, a 48.2% increase year-over-year, a rare growth rate in the current low-interest-rate, asset-scarce market environment.

As the biggest shortcoming in performance, Sunshine Property & Casualty’s operations contrasted sharply with life insurance, mainly due to concentrated claims risk in guaranteed insurance. In 2025, Sunshine P&C’s original premium income was 47.89 billion yuan, nearly flat at 0.1% growth, far below the group’s 17.4% total premium growth. The combined cost ratio for all P&C lines rose to 102.1%, surpassing the break-even point, resulting in underwriting losses of 1.03 billion yuan for the year, with only non-guaranteed insurance business showing slight profit. Among these, the combined cost ratio for guaranteed insurance was as high as 129.0%, with underwriting losses of 1.51 billion yuan, making it a “loss black hole” in the P&C sector. This reflects significant vulnerabilities in the company’s risk management in credit guarantee insurance, with the existing business risk clearance progress below expectations.

Although auto insurance turned profitable through precise pricing and risk control, with a combined cost ratio of 98.2% and underwriting profit of 480 million yuan, it was insufficient to offset the negative impact of huge guaranteed insurance losses. The incremental benefits from optimizing non-auto insurance business structure were also swallowed by losses, hindering the overall quality improvement and efficiency enhancement of the P&C sector.

Bancassurance becomes the core growth engine, individual insurance channels face transformation pains

According to the financial report, Sunshine Life’s channel performance showed a “polarized” pattern. The bancassurance channel experienced explosive growth, becoming the core growth driver for life insurance. Data shows that in 2025, Sunshine Life’s bancassurance new single premium reached 34.09 billion yuan, a 69.0% surge. This growth is particularly remarkable given the strict implementation of the “reporting and operation integration” policy in the industry. More impressively, bancassurance is not just about “scaling up without value,” as Huatai Research’s report indicates, Sunshine Life’s new business value (NBV) increased by 64.6% year-over-year, with floating yield products accounting for 32.2% of new single premiums. Some broker analyses suggest that the strong performance of bancassurance benefits from regulatory policy adjustments that have expanded branch networks, and under the declining deposit interest rates, Sunshine’s distinctive bancassurance products effectively meet residents’ demand for stable financial management.

In stark contrast, the individual insurance channel is undergoing painful transformation. In 2025, new single premiums in the individual channel were 6.05 billion yuan, down 7.6% year-over-year. Although the new business value still grew by 18.5%, reflecting product structure optimization boosting value rates, the shrinking scale of new premiums is a clear warning. In terms of team efficiency, the average productivity per agent was 22,000 yuan, down from 25,000 yuan in 2024, indicating that the stability of elite teams is still insufficient to offset overall personnel fluctuations.

This channel divergence reflects deeper industry shifts. Amid the downward adjustment of guaranteed interest rates and the reshaping of channel structures under the “reporting and operation integration” policy, bancassurance, backed by bank trust and extensive branch coverage, is once again becoming the main force for insurers’ scale expansion; meanwhile, individual channels face dual pressures of agent attrition and activity rate fluctuations. For Sunshine Insurance, the explosive growth in bancassurance demonstrates strategic agility in channel deployment, but the weakness in individual insurance also serves as a reminder: how to maintain the traditional value-creating position of individual insurance while achieving high growth in bancassurance remains a key transformation challenge.

Looking at Sunshine Insurance’s full-year 2025 results, it is clear that this is a report characterized by structural differentiation. For investors, this annual report not only demonstrates Sunshine Insurance’s execution in value transformation but also reveals shortcomings in its business synergy and risk control systems. In 2026, with the divestment of P&C risk businesses and deeper reforms in individual insurance, whether the company can transition from “differentiation” to “balance” may be what the market’s rational outlook is watching.