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Chinese mainland insurers see heightened interest in their H-shares

CFBOND
2019-01-23 09:41

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Hong Kong-listed insurers from the Chinese mainland are winning favor with global institutional investors as the fundamentals of the insurance sector strengthened, said a report of Shanghai Securities News on Tuesday.

In January, global institutional investors like JPMorgan Chase & Co., BlackRock Inc. and UBS Group AG are buying H-shares of Chinese mainland insurers in a binge, statistics of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) show.

Their favorite has been Ping An Insurance (Group) Co of China Ltd., which saw UBS Group AG increase stakes in it by 1.8 million H-shares on Jan. 14. Then on Jan. 15, JPMorgan bought over 16.41 million Ping An H-shares at a price of 70.44 HK dollars (8.98 U.S. dollars) each. This move was followed on the same day by BlackRock which purchased 2.65 million shares of this company's Hong Kong-listed stocks.

China Life Insurance Co., Ltd. was another popular target. On Jan. 15, JPMorgan Chase increased its holdings in this company by over 6.71 million H-shares.

BlackRock was even more generous in this regard, buying 206,200 H-shares of New China Life Insurance Co., Ltd. on Jan. 10, 826,000 H-shares of People's Insurance Company (Group) of China Limited on Jan. 16, and close to 6.33 million H-shares of China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd. on Jan. 17.

This heightened interest originated from the improved fundamentals of the insurance sector at the Chinese mainland, investment analysts believed.

Statistics showed that in the fourth quarter of 2018, life insurance premiums at the Chinese mainland had grown as expected. Since the second quarter of 2018, such payments had sustained double-digit expansion and had been climbing at a faster pace. 

In particular, premiums from new policies achieved a significant upturn, with Ping An Insurance standing out as the most impressive player. In 2018, this company achieved positive growth in new policy premiums.
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