Golden Finance News | CICC International expressed that Ping An Insurance (02318) announced its performance for the first three quarters, believing that the company's profit performance largely meets market expectations. However, the growth of new business value in Q3 exceeded expectations, benefiting from the significant impact of NBV value rate (+7.3 percentage points year-on-year) and new business premiums (+50.4% year-on-year in the third quarter). In terms of investment performance, the company's net investment yield in the third quarter was 3.8%, a decrease of 0.2 percentage points year-on-year; the comprehensive investment yield was 5.0%, an increase of 1.2 percentage points year-on-year, mainly driven by the significant increase in investment income due to fair value changes in FVOCI assets. Considering that currently, most insurance companies use comprehensive investment yield (CIY) as a comparison target with the assumed long-term investment return in embedded value calculations (4.5%), it is expected that CIY growth will make a positive contribution to the difference in annual investment experience.

The bank mentioned that the company is currently trading at 0.54 times FY24 P/EV and 0.81 times FY24 P/B, both of which are 0.6/0.2 standard deviations higher than its 3-year historical averages. The bank believes that a significant improvement in the company's fundamentals will support further valuation recovery. The bank has raised its earnings forecast for the company for FY24-26 by 14%/7%/3% to RMB 7.44/7.57/7.90 per share, and increased the target price to HKD 65.1, corresponding to 1.09 times FY24 P/B and 0.73 times FY24 P/EV.