Recently, a news about the salary cut of Ping An Bank employees has been circulating in the industry.
According to public media reports, "a number of employees of Ping An Bank said that they and their departments had different degrees of 'discounts' in performance bonuses that month. Some employees relayed the caliber of the human resources department that there is no unified salary reduction plan for this discount, and it is mainly issued according to the results of different departments and job assessments. ”
At the same time, an employee of the head office of Ping An Bank revealed to the media, "This is indeed the case, in fact, the advance bonus of our salary package has shrunk." Speaking of it, it's all your own money, and part of it is given as a bonus. It's still shrinking, it's tough. ”
To a certain extent, the salary cut of employees also reflects some of the current operating difficulties of Ping An Bank. According to the data, Ping An Bank achieved operating income of 38.770 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 14.0%. Through digital transformation, we drove operation cost reduction and efficiency increase, strengthened asset quality control, and increased the collection and disposal of non-performing assets, achieving a net profit of 14.932 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.3%. Although profits still increased year-on-year, the decline in operating income of "10%+" is not a good sign.
In fact, in 2023, Ping An Bank has already increased profits but not revenue, of which in 2023, Ping An Bank achieved an operating income of 164.699 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8.4%, and a net profit of 46.455 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.1%.
As an important subsidiary of Ping An Group and an important part of Ping An Group's integrated finance, the difficulties encountered by Ping An Bank in the past two years actually represent some of the problems that Ping An Group is currently facing.
1
Ping An Bank's per capita salary is "ebbing" and no longer dominates the list!
Although "living a hard life" is the consensus of the current financial industry. However, the decline in the per capita salary of Ping An Bank is indeed the largest among its peers, and at the same time, the per capita salary of Ping An Bank has been declining for many years. Since hitting a high of 600,200 yuan per capita salary in 2019, this data has declined for four years, and as of the latest data, the average salary of Ping An Bank is 480,100 yuan.
At that time, Ping An Bank had repeatedly set the highest annual salary per capita of the bank, but in recent years, due to the rapid rate of salary cuts, the per capita salary of Ping An Bank has ceased to be among the best among joint-stock banks.
Behind this is not only the reason for the collective salary cut in the financial industry, but also the changes in the business strategy and fundamentals of Ping An Bank.
At the 2023 results conference, the management of Ping An Bank said frankly when talking about the performance of "increasing profits without increasing income", on the one hand, the interest rate spread has narrowed, and on the other hand, it has actively controlled high-yield and high-risk businesses according to the economic environment since the second half of last year, which has had an impact on short-term operating income.
Under the contraction strategy, Ping An Bank's operating income in the first quarter of this year was 38.77 billion yuan, down 14% from the same period last year.
At the same time, due to the current key stages of Ping An Bank's transformation, such as reducing high-risk retail business, and simultaneously increasing mortgage business; Focusing on corporate business and building a business portfolio in emerging industries, Ping An Bank's revenue and profit are expected to be under pressure in the future.
2
The overall contraction of the group is obvious, and the "optimization" of personnel exceeds expectations
In fact, the contraction of Ping An Group does not stop at Ping An Bank, and the entire Ping An Group is in a contraction situation from some data.
One of the most typical is the number of employees, and in the past two years, Ping An has been the fastest-declining insurer in the industry. According to the data, the number of employees in Ping An's insurance industry has dropped from 189,300 in 2021 to 151,500 at present, with a compound annual growth rate of -10.6%, which means that the number of employees in Ping An in the past two years will be discounted by 9% on the basis of the previous year. In 2021, Ping An was the insurance company with the largest number of employees in China.
Under the influence of a high base and a high rate of decline, Ping An has also become the insurance company with the largest absolute decline in the number of employees in the industry, with nearly 40,000 employees in the past two years.
We believe that there are two main reasons: first, Ping An is a private insurance group, and the mobility of employees will be relatively large, while insurance companies such as PICC and China Life Insurance are state-controlled financial groups, and the mobility of employees will be relatively small.
The second point is that Ping An has adopted a certain shrinkage strategy in the past two years and has taken the initiative to optimize the personnel structure. In the past two years, there has been news of layoffs in a number of subsidiaries of Ping An, such as Ping An Good Doctor last year, which has begun the adjustment of the positions of middle-level and high-level employees and ordinary employees. Among them, most of the middle and senior executives need to be re-hired, including senior vice presidents Chen Lin, Wu Dejun and others who lost in the competition. In addition, the main organizational structure of Ping An Good Doctor has also been rearranged into five centers, including the technology center and the medical business center. Compared with the end of 2020, the number of employees of Ping An Good Doctor has been reduced by more than half.
Although Ping An Bank denied the rumor, the number of employees in Ping An Bank decreased from 44,207 in 2022 to 43,119 in 2023, a decrease of 2.47%.
In addition, there are also rumors of layoffs in the insurance sector, the core business of Ping An Group, which can also be confirmed by the specific figures disclosed in the annual report.
3
Integrated finance has led Ping An for 20 years, where will it go in the future?
The integrated financial model has always been the core development strategy of Ping An, and almost every year Ping An's annual report will have a strong description of this model. At Ping An's Investor Open Day in November last year, Xie Yonglin, General Manager and Co-CEO of Ping An, said: "The core of Ping An's integrated financial model is that it is always driven by customer needs and comprehensively covers the financial scenarios in customers' daily lives.
Ping An introduced that relying on the strong scientific and technological foundation, relying on the two business models of "integrated finance + medical and elderly care", focusing on the diversified financial and life service needs of the Chinese market, Ping An has always been committed to becoming a world-leading comprehensive financial and medical pension service group, through the solution of "one customer, one account, multiple products, and one-stop service". According to the latest data from the first quarterly report, as of the end of March 2024, the number of Ping An's individual customers was nearly 234 million, an increase of 1.0% from the beginning of the year; The average number of contracts per customer reached 2.94. Since the end of 2019, the number of customers has increased by 17.9%, while the number of contracts per customer has increased by 10.1%.
In the past 20 years of rapid economic development, Ping An has relied on an integrated financial model to provide one-stop financial services to customers, which has greatly met the daily needs of customers and contributed to the rapid development of Ping An.
However, as the economy has entered a stage of high-quality development in recent years, the GDP growth center has gradually fallen back to around 5%, and many of the previous growth logics in the industry are no longer applicable to the current situation.
In the new stage of development, service capability and refined operation have become important ideas in the industry. An integrated financial model such as Ping An will be more challenging, as the risk of having subsidiaries can easily affect the reputation of the entire group.
The most typical is the postponement of payment of Ping An Trust-related products. In the past, the information on the postponement of the payment of the Funing No. 615 trust plan managed by Ping An Trust has attracted widespread attention, and a large number of customers who have purchased the Funing No. 615 trust plan are suspected of gathering at the gate of Ping An Financial Center, the headquarters of Ping An Trust in Shenzhen, in an attempt to get the trust money back as soon as possible. Although the official Ping An Trust explained the relevant situation on the official public account for the first time, saying that it would work hard to collect the money, the negative impact of this incident on the reputation of Ping An Group as a whole has been caused, and the guidance of public opinion is not optimistic.
In addition, the integrated financial model has greatly increased the management difficulty of Ping An's core management, and Ping An's financial territory has spread throughout the insurance, banking, securities, trust and other industries, and it is one of the top financial groups in China. Generally speaking, the first and second leaders of subsidiaries are directly appointed by Ping An Group, which can strengthen Ping An Group's leadership over subsidiaries, but it also leads to more parachute leaders and insufficient understanding of subsidiaries, which affects the development of business.
For example, in September last year, Chen Xinying, co-CEO and executive deputy general manager of Ping An, officially resigned, and after resigning as a senior manager, Chen Xinying was transferred to the company's non-executive director on January 1, 2024. Less than half a year before Chen Xinying's resignation, Yao Bo resigned from relevant administrative positions such as co-CEO and executive deputy general manager due to personal and family reasons.
After the resignation of the two core managers, Ma Mingzhe was a little unable to sit still. Three years ago, Ping An officially announced that as the founder, founder and chairman of Ping An of China, Ma Mingzhe presided over the overall operation and management of Ping An until June 2020 and will no longer serve as CEO, mainly responsible for the company's strategy, talent, culture and major decision-making, playing a core leadership role, and Ma Mingzhe has also entered a semi-retired state.
However, in January this year, Ping An issued an internal document that Chairman Ma Mingzhe was appointed as the director of the Strategic Development Center of Ping An Group, co-CEO Guo Xiaotao served as the deputy director, and Fu Xin was no longer the director of the Strategic Development Center. After more than 20 years of absence, Ma Mingzhe once again took the role.
This time Ma Mingzhe is back in the mountains, and it is easy for us to connect with the departure of two core executives last year, which is enough to see that Ping An still needs a person who can "hold the scene".
At this special moment, Ma Mingzhe also needs to stabilize the army's morale, and we will continue to pay attention to the effect.