Dear colleagues,

Another new year is upon us. We are embracing the coming New Year of 2019 with great expectations.

In 2018, we marked the 40th anniversary of the ‘reform and opening’ of China. In the ‘reform and opening’ period, China experienced unprecedented changes. Through the hard work of Chinese people tremendous progress was made over this period, making the social and economic miracle of today’s China a reality in the world.

During 2018, we also marked the 30th anniversary of Ping An. Thirty years ago, in the wake of the country’s reform policy, Ping An was born in Shekou, Shenzhen. Ping An is a ‘child’ of ‘reform and opening’. We benefitted from the environment created by the ‘reform and opening’ process, which was conducive to the development of a new company like Ping An. Ping An was able to evolve; “Building a business from scratch; growing from small to large, and from large to strong”, while all the time keeping to our philosophy of, “seeking survival through ensuring our competitiveness in the face of competition and seeking development through innovation”.

Looking back, we are very grateful. We can say, every step of Ping An’s development was closely related to the development of ‘reform and opening’ and the tremendous progress of our country. Ping An owes its achievement to the historical opportunity of the ‘reform and opening’ policy and the peaceful and prosperous environment it has created in China. In order to show our gratitude, we have always made “giving back to the community and helping to build a better country” a key focus of our corporate mission.

In this respect, Ping An has been actively engaged in targeted poverty alleviation through various public welfare activities for many years. In 2018, with the 30th anniversary of our company, Ping An launched the “Three-Village Project” to help village officers, doctors and teachers and strengthen industries, health care and education in rural areas for a better future. In our commitment to upgrade the project to ‘Smart Poverty Alleviation’, we are integrating the financial and technology resources of Ping An, to achieved our goal of alleviating poverty, providing medical treatment and teaching resources to the rural population in developing areas.

In this respect, we have focused on farming and aquaculture industries, that have a synergy with our own industrial resources, and we provided production, technology and financing support to the rural areas in order to upgrade their industries and help them to “truly get rid of poverty once for all”.

At the beginning of 2018, Ping An signed the “Three-Village Strategic Cooperation Agreement” with Wulanchabu city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in order to help the local enterprise Yin Shan You Mai.

• In the first phase, we used insurance to launch poverty alleviation loans and provided the local impoverished farmers with free whole-supply-chain industry services, including providing premium seeds, cooperative farming and protective buyback.

• In the second phase, we provided technology support, such as remote sensing and intelligent recognition, to farming in order to improve production efficiency and guarantee that poverty alleviation could benefit every household.

• In the third phase, we used ecommerce platform technology to support sales and formed the production-to-sales process loop to help build a sustainable poverty alleviation model.

Our smart poverty alleviation project in Wulanchabu covered 1,087 households and increased average household income by 4,860 Yuan. In all more than ten million Yuan of sales were achieved from various agricultural products arising from the poverty alleviation project. This project created “new channels” for the local people to improve their livelihoods and greatly boosted the local economy.

Our alleviation project covered a number of professional services to local communities. In terms of “rural doctors”, we adopted technologies such as telemedicine and intelligent interpretation of medical images to build a smart healthcare platform. These services connect rural farmers and their communities to premium medical resources in the cities and improve the medical service quality of the rural areas. In 2018, we purchased mobile hospital equipment and organized renowned specialist doctors to go to developing regions and provide free medical consultations to local farmers and their families. Our innovative cloud platform can instantly upload the medical reports to the data center at the back office to achieve online-offline simultaneous interpretation and diagnosis. By this way, the platform can send health risk alerts to the farming communities in a timely manner and report major diseases to the local health agencies and help farming communities identify and treat diseases at an early stage. The cloud platform will help to reduce the risks to health of poverty and win the critical battle of poverty alleviation. To this end, in less than one year the mobile hospital of Ping An travelled more than 10,000 kilometers. The mobile medical facility carried advanced equipment and medical resources covering almost 100 villages and delivered quality consultation services to more than 10,000 villagers.

As well as providing professional medical services, the smart poverty alleviation project also promoted better professional education services. In terms of “rural teachers”, we used cloud platform technology and other advanced technologies as the information bridge to introduce premium education resources from the cities to the developing regions. This increased the education quality of the rural areas and enabled the children in the developing regions to access to quality teaching experiences.

Using Ping An’s smart teaching platform, on International Children’s Day of 2018 the popular lecturer of TV program “Lecture Room” and professor of Sha’anxi Normal University, Mr. Yu Gengzhe, explored the history of Silk Road and the magnificent landscapes of “Belt and Road”. Professor Yu, who presented the programme in Jiayu Pass of The Great Wall, read classical poems together with children in more than one hundred elementary schools in rural areas. The Professor had real-time interactions with children from Ping An Hope Elementary School, in Mashan County of Guangxi, and Ping An Smart Elementary School, in Fengjie County of Chongqing, to give them an immersive experience. In the classroom, the children had the opportunity to see the splendid landscapes of our country, learn history from this knowledgeable scholar, expand their horizons and open a window through which they could experience the wonderful world outside their villages.

By the end of 2018, the “Three-Village Smart Poverty Alleviation Project” was launched in nine provinces and autonomous regions in China. The project:

• issued more than 5 billion yuan of poverty alleviation funds;

• helped build or upgrade more than 400 village clinics;

• and trained more than 5,000 village doctors.

The project also helped:

• build or upgrade almost 400 village schools

• and trained almost 5,000 village teachers;

• and its online remote classrooms benefited more than 200,000 teachers and students.

At Ping An, we have encouraged our employees to actively participate in public welfare activities and founded: “Ping An Volunteer Association”. More than 100,000 employees participated in various volunteer activities in their spare time and dedicated more 330,000 hours in volunteer teaching services alone.

In the process of implementing the “Three-Village Poverty Alleviation Project”, many outstanding poverty alleviation managers and employees impressed us with their moving stories. They have greatly motivated all the employees of Ping An with their dedication and selfless contribution.

One such manger is Qiu Xuhang, a property insurance rural official manager. He promoted the newly developed “poverty alleviation insurance” in more than ten provinces. Xu Gang, a banking rural official manager, went to developing regions to better understand loan demands, despite suffering from a chronic illness himself. Wang Zhan, a director of Wuhan Imaging Center Ultrasound Division of Ping An Health Testing Center, served more than 3,000 villagers within half a year after his recruitment in Ping An. Luo Haowen, a rural teachers manager, led the provincial teaching program to achieve 176% of its target. Finally, but not least, Xiao Jianrong, the party-masses relationship director of Ping An Group, spared no effort working on the poverty alleviation project in Heyuan Zijin County. He was highly praised by the local provincial leader, who described Mr Xiao as: “A party member from outside of our county who even knows our local village better than our local cadres.”

There are also thousands of other colleagues who are working in the Ping An poverty alleviation project. They work together to spread love and hope. You are great! All the employees of Ping An are proud of you! We salute you!

The Ping An philosophy of “Serve the country and serve the community” is what we stand for and live by. In this respect, last year Ping An:

• paid more than 100 billion yuan of taxes;
• provided more than 100 billion yuan of financing in various forms to help excellent private enterprises to overcome their financial problems, thus facilitating the real economy to develop;
• and continued our Spring Festival program of “take a safe journey and bring love home”, to help migrant workers to reunite with their families in this traditional festival of China.

All of these activities, together with the Ping An Three-Village Project, are aimed at achieving the same goal:

“To implement our social responsibility and apply our knowledge and capabilities, acquired during the process of developing our financial and technological businesses, to the service of the community, the people and the country.”

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the volunteers and I hope that more and more Ping An employees will be engaged in the volunteer services. Let us start from the small good deeds, work hard, develop and contribute our wisdom, devote our love, and work together to promote one of the traditional virtues of China; obtaining satisfaction from helping other people.

The year 2019 is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It is also the crucial year of the strategic transformation of Ping An Insurance. In this respect, we have upgraded our group corporate logo and clearly defined the core business of Ping An as “Finance + Technology”. In the future, on the basis of ensuring the stable growth of our main financial businesses, we will continue to invest heavily in technology. We will strengthen our “Financial + Ecosystem” efforts and developments. We will continuously enhance and develop our core advantages, in order to achieve better growth and thus contribute to the 70th birthday of our country.

The year 2019 is also the crucial year of our “Three-Village Smart Poverty Alleviation Project”. It is a project that benefits the people and we must spare no effort to implement the program. We will continue to make solid progress in this public welfare project that serves important rural communities and helps the country. We will use our financial strength, technology, wisdom and knowledge to make new contributions to our country and our people.

The guiding theme or motif for this New Year message is: ‘Paying tribute to our past, being grateful and starting the new journey’. Ping An will continue to embody the zeitgeist of ‘reform and opening’. We will shoulder our social responsibilities and share the same destiny and growth with the People’s Republic of China!

I wish you all good health, good progress in your careers, lead a meaningful life, and have peace and prosperity in the coming New Year!