Lujiazui Cathay Life Insurance Co., Ltd. has undergone a change in its Chief Investment Officer position. Gong Zhirong, the 63-year-old General Manager of the company, will no longer hold this concurrent role, with the baton passed to Hu Xi, the current Deputy General Manager and Chief Financial Officer.
This change comes as the company enters a landmark stage of development. Recently disclosed operational data shows that in 2025, Lujiazui Cathay Life's total premium income exceeded 10.6 billion yuan, a substantial year-on-year increase of 49%; within this, new single premiums surpassed 5.2 billion yuan, growing at a rapid rate of 120%. This not only signifies the company's first entry into the "ten-billion-yuan club" but also marks a striking upward trajectory amidst a generally challenging growth environment for small and medium-sized life insurers.
The strengthening of control by executives from the "Lujiazui" faction is evident. Public resumes indicate that Gong Zhirong is a core manager who has grown with Lujiazui Cathay Life. Born in 1962 and holding an MBA from CEIBS, he was deeply involved in the preparatory work for its establishment and organizational development as early as the company's setup phase in 2004. His career highlights are numerous, including participation in the establishment of Cathay Financial Holdings in Taiwan, the organizational restructuring of Cathay Life Insurance in Taiwan, leading the development of an integrated marketing system for subsidiaries under Cathay Financial Holdings, and involvement in core business areas such as merger and acquisition evaluations for insurance companies, accumulating solid industry expertise over more than thirty years in the life insurance sector. In May 2021, Gong Zhirong assumed the role of General Manager, and two years later, he also took on the position of Chief Investment Officer, consolidating authority over both management operations and investment decisions. He is now 63 years old, exceeding the common age threshold for senior executives in the insurance industry.
The successor, Hu Xi, currently the Deputy General Manager and Chief Financial Officer, was born in 1967 and holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics. Since starting his career in 1990, his experience spans the real estate and financial sectors, having held positions at Hutchison Whampoa Properties (Shanghai), Lujiazui Group, and other institutions, serving in key roles such as Financial Manager, Audit Director, and Financial Controller, possessing profound experience in financial control and risk governance. It is noteworthy that this is the second senior management change at the company recently. In November 2025, Zheng Zhou, then Board Secretary, Compliance Officer, and Chief Risk Officer, was promoted to Deputy General Manager. Both Hu Xi and Zheng Zhou clearly carry backgrounds linked to the major shareholder, the Lujiazui faction, making the shareholder's intent to strengthen operational control clearly visible through this series of personnel arrangements.
Currently, the company has a total of 7 senior executives: Gong Zhirong as General Manager; four Deputy General Managers: Hu Xi, Cai Bingjie, Zheng Zhou, and Zhang Huibin; Zhou Haobo as Assistant General Manager and Chief Actuary; and Zhang Qiaomin as Audit Responsible Person. All are from the "post-60s" and "post-70s" generations. Among them, 63-year-old General Manager Gong Zhirong is the eldest. The handover of his previously held CIO responsibilities to another core executive raises questions: is this a routine optimization of duties, or a preliminary step for a future leadership transition? This warrants further observation.
The third quarter contributed nearly half of the annual premiums. While industry growth dividends increasingly concentrate towards leading institutions, leaving many small and medium-sized life insurers struggling with shrinking market share, a Sino-foreign joint venture that has been operating for over twenty years has charted an alternative path with an unusually strong growth curve. Recently, Lujiazui Cathay Life disclosed its 2025 operational data at an annual event. By the end of 2025, the company's total assets exceeded 43 billion yuan, a 27% increase from the previous year; annual total premium income broke through 10.6 billion yuan, a significant 49% year-on-year increase, successfully crossing the ten-billion-yuan threshold; within this, new single premiums exceeded 5.2 billion yuan, a 120% year-on-year increase. This series of growth rates not only far exceeds the industry's single-digit average growth but also starkly contrasts with the stagnant or even shrinking premiums of most small and medium-sized peers.
The crucial growth trajectory is hidden in the quarterly data: in the first three quarters of last year, the company achieved insurance business revenue of 9.206 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 59.5%; notably, the premium income in the third quarter alone reached 5.072 billion yuan, accounting for 55.1% of the total for the first three quarters. This implies that nearly half of the company's annual premiums were concentrated in a single quarter.
This explosive growth is directly reflected in cash flow. According to solvency reports, the net cash flow of the company's participating insurance account was 644 million yuan at the end of the second quarter of 2025, which surged to 2.907 billion yuan by the end of the third quarter, representing a net inflow of 2.263 billion yuan in a single quarter. This sharp fluctuation in cash flow直观 reveals that savings-oriented business, represented by participating insurance, was the core engine driving this round of scale growth. This aligns with the industry-wide trend since 2025, where many companies have shifted focus towards promoting participating insurance to attract customers and hedge against declining interest rates.
Performance on the profitability front also shows resilience. Apart from a brief loss in 2017, the company has long maintained a profitable foundation; even against the backdrop of declining interest rates and widespread pressure on industry profits in recent years, it has not broken this fundamental profitability. In 2024, the company's profits began to rebound from a low point, and in the first three quarters of 2025, it achieved a net profit of 993 million yuan under the new accounting standards coupled with a recovery in the capital market, demonstrating strong operational risk resistance under the dual tests of falling interest rates and intensified market competition.
However, aggressive scale expansion comes at a cost, most directly reflected in the rapid consumption of solvency adequacy ratios. At the end of the third quarter of 2025, the company's core solvency adequacy ratio and comprehensive solvency adequacy ratio fell to 121.64% and 162.60% respectively, a sharp decline of over 15 percentage points compared to the end of the second quarter. Furthermore, Q4 forecast data indicates that both ratios are expected to decline further by 14.48 and 16.93 percentage points. The Q3 solvency report attributes the decline in solvency adequacy ratios to a decrease in net assets due to reduced other comprehensive income, and an increase in the minimum capital for insurance risk and interest rate risk due to business scale expansion.
Simultaneously, compliance risks have begun to emerge amidst rapid development. In the third quarter, the company was penalized on the same day by the Shandong and Guangdong financial regulatory bureaus, with infractions including training materials for the "Xinxi Chuanshi Concept" in multiple channels containing "acts that instigate or induce insurance agents to violate their duty of good faith." These blemishes sound a compliance alarm for the company's rapid expansion.
Overall, in the pivotal year of 2025 marked by industry divergence, Lujiazui Cathay Life has carved out its position with ten-billion-yuan premiums: as the market shifts from broad-based growth to structural opportunities, those small and medium-sized insurers capable of precisely capturing specific customer needs (such as mid-to-high-end savings, pension planning) and leveraging shareholder resources to build differentiated capabilities in investment and risk control can still find their own space for survival and development.
But the true test of its "post-ten-billion era" may have just begun. The key to transitioning from a "small but beautiful" entity to a "stable and strong" one will be its ability to convert short-term scale achievements into a lasting victory built on business value, risk management, and ecosystem services.
Comments