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ZA Online's "three Ma co-governance" era is drawing to a close, as founder Ou Yaping seizes the position of largest shareholder, and within the ZA ecosystem he has built, asset shuffling is already constant.
On October 23, ZA Online (06060.HK, full name ZA Online P&C Insurance Co., Ltd.) hit an intraday record low of HK$8.775 per share, down more than 91% from its peak of HK$97.8 shortly after listing.
Since the start of this year, ZA Online has been fluctuating downward, falling more than 40%. Behind the share price decline, the "first internet insurance stock" has undergone a dramatic change in equity structure.
At the end of May this year, founding shareholder Ou Yaping acquired family internal equity, raising his stake in ZA Online to the top position. By July, through continuous increases, he lifted his shareholding to 12.73%, firmly seated as the largest shareholder.
The combined shareholding of the three major shareholders—Ant Group, Tencent, and Ping An of China—fell from nearly half to about 20% today, and the "three Ma co-governance" era is coming to an end.
ZA Online's net profit is still growing steadily, with five consecutive years of underwriting profitability. The founder's consolidation of equity helps reduce core shareholder friction and improve decision-making efficiency.
Despite the positives, the capital market is filled with caution and hesitation. A closer look at Ou Yaping and his capital map raises an unavoidable concern: will ZA Online become entangled in the major shareholder's capital game in the future?
The founder's "return"
ZA Online's starting point was dazzling. In 2013, Ant Group, Tencent, and Ping An of China jointly initiated the establishment of ZA Online, with the three major shareholders collectively holding nearly 50% at one point.
Jack Ma, Pony Ma, and Ma Mingzhe stood together in support, giving it a halo from birth. The key figure who brought the "three Ma" together was Ou Yaping. As a result, ZA Online's first chairman was also Ou Yaping, but he was checked by the three major shareholders.
At the company's inception, Ou Yaping and his brother Ou Yafei held a combined 22.1% through Shenzhen Rixun Network Technology Co., Ltd. (Rixun Network) and Shenzhen Jiadexin Investment Co., Ltd. (Jiadexin). Although this was higher than Ant Group's 19.9%, the holdings were separate, so their voice did not exceed Ant's.
Over the following decade and more, ZA Online's equity continued to change. First came capital increases and share expansion, then the 2017 listing, and the "three Ma" stakes were gradually diluted. By 2022, Ant Group began reducing its stake, cashing out more than HK$2 billion in total, with its holding falling to 6.43%.
Tencent started reducing its stake last year, dropping to 4.84% and exiting the list of major shareholders. Another major shareholder, Ping An of China, remained unchanged but its stake was passively diluted to about 8.9%.
The two giants as industrial shareholders retreated one after another, which is not unrelated to their own development. Ant Group already has Ant Insurance, and Tencent has also built platforms such as WeSure. Under a subtle competitive relationship, from a financial investor's perspective, reducing holdings to optimize capital allocation is entirely normal.
As for Ping An of China, it is already a trillion-level insurance giant, and its investment in ZA Online is likely just left to take its natural course. Ou Yaping's opportunity had arrived.
At the end of May this year, Ou Yaping completed a key family equity integration. He acquired equity in affiliated companies controlled by Ou Yafei, consolidating shares held separately by the Ou brothers over many years under his own name.
Through Jiadexin and Rixun Network, Ou Yaping's combined stake in ZA Online jumped from 4.81% to 11.94%, returning him to the position of largest shareholder.
It was not over yet. By July, Jiadexin, effectively controlled by Ou Yaping, increased its holdings in ZA Online for eight consecutive trading days, spending about HK$130 million, raising its stake to about 12.18%.
From the equity moves, Ou Yaping's control over ZA Online is shifting from "scattered holdings" to "centralized consolidation," with his voice significantly strengthened. However, ZA Online still currently has no controlling shareholder and no actual controller, and Ou Yaping's 12.18% stake is still far from control.
Nevertheless, as founder and largest shareholder, his actual influence over the board and strategic direction can no longer be measured simply by shareholding ratio. More importantly, an external question arises: as the founder's control over the company continues to strengthen, will the company's capital path undergo fundamental changes?
Continuous capital operations
Ou Yaping once thrived in Hong Kong stock circles thanks to his skillful capital operations. After leaving his university teaching post, Ou Yaping went south to Hong Kong in the early 1990s and founded Baishida Company, dealing in crude oil.
A few years later he entered real estate, and Baishida Garden made a splash in Shenzhen, with first-phase sales reaching 1.5 billion yuan. In 1998, Baishida Holdings, backed by real estate, listed in Hong Kong.
As the real estate business flourished, capital operations advanced in parallel. A year before Baishida's listing, Ou Yaping founded Baijiang Group, mainly engaged in urban gas development and management. In 2001, Baijiang Gas was spun off from Baishida and listed on Hong Kong's Growth Enterprise Market.
A year later, Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa took a stake in Baijiang Gas. A few years later, Ou Yaping sold most of his Baijiang Gas shares and exited the gas industry, with Hong Kong tycoon Lee Shau-kee taking over.
Another example of Ou Yaping's financial skill was taking over the listed company Yinwang Consortium. In March 2002, Baishida launched an acquisition of Yinwang Consortium, first paying HK$81 million in cash, with the remainder paid via two-year convertible bonds.
At the same time, Yinwang Consortium acquired 70% of Fuhuade Power Co., Ltd., a Baishida subsidiary, for HK$360 million, of which HK$160 million was paid in cash and the rest in installments via mortgage loans. In this acquisition, Baishida became the major shareholder of Yinwang Consortium without spending a single cent of cash.
In the era of high-turnover real estate, Ou Yaping proactively contracted the real estate business, shifting the center of his asset map to financial business, and ZA Online was born. ZA Technology and ZA International were established one after another. The former is wholly owned by ZA Online and focuses on fintech R&D; the latter handles ZA Online's overseas business and was jointly funded by ZA Technology and Baishida Holdings (later renamed Z Fin).
The most valuable asset of ZA International is ZA Bank, which holds one of the first Hong Kong virtual banking licenses and also has virtual insurance and fintech businesses. The equity changes at ZA International in recent years reflect Ou Yaping's capital operation thinking from the side.
When ZA International was founded in 2017, ZA Technology held 51%, more than Baishida. It was not until May 2023 that the situation began to change, as Baishida increased its stake to become the largest shareholder.
A few months later, ZA International was removed from ZA Online's financial statements and became a joint venture. Subsequently, ZA Technology increased its stake, slightly trailing Baishida. In August last year, ZA Technology increased its stake again to 45.76%, regaining its position as the largest shareholder of ZA International.
After years of large losses at ZA International, Baishida's stake increase reflected the family platform's intention to take over and protect ZA Online's valuation. ZA Bank began to turn profitable last year, and ZA International's value rose. At this time, letting ZA Technology take the lead may be intended to keep the value of the virtual banking license and its technology attributes within the main narrative of insurance technology.
The repeated "contests" for the largest shareholder position can be seen as Ou Yaping continuously adjusting the position of ZA International as a chess piece.
Will ZA Online be drawn into the capital story?
The change in control of ZA International further highlights ZA Online's position in Ou Yaping's asset map. As the hub of the ZA financial chess game, ZA Online's own operating situation deserves attention.
At the operating level, ZA Online has in fact completed a certain degree of "gear shifting." In 2024, ZA Online's net profit attributable to shareholders was 603 million yuan. Although the previous year recorded a profit of 4.078 billion yuan, most of that came from a one-time investment gain from deconsolidating ZA International, so it was a return to normalized profitability; in 2025 it further rose to 1.102 billion yuan, up 82.5% year on year; in the first half of 2026 it reached 1.55 billion yuan, surging 132.2% year on year.
At the same time, the company has achieved underwriting profitability for five consecutive years. In the first half of 2026, underwriting profit was 773 million yuan, with a combined ratio of 95.5%.
This means that ZA Online's core narrative has shifted from the early stage of "telling an internet traffic story" to the stage of "making money through underwriting and operational efficiency."
The other side of the operating gear shift is the proactive adjustment of business structure. Analyzing the first-half 2026 data reveals three clear divergence curves.
The first is the health ecosystem business, which is the foundation. First-half gross written premium was 6.714 billion yuan, up 7% year on year, with a combined ratio of 92.7%, making it the most solid profit-contributing segment.
The second is the digital life ecosystem. First-half gross written premium was 7.743 billion yuan, up 24.7% year on year, but the combined ratio was 99.2%, almost on the break-even line, exposing the problem of "running fast but not making money."
The third is the auto ecosystem. First-half gross written premium was 1.541 billion yuan, up only 4.2% year on year, a clear slowdown. Among that, new energy vehicle insurance premium surged 105.7% year on year, with its proportion continuing to rise. But the auto ecosystem's combined ratio was 93.3%, up 2.1 percentage points year on year, and the loss ratio also rose 4.3 percentage points year on year.
From this it can be seen that ZA Online is proactively contracting high-risk, low-margin consumer finance business and betting resources on health insurance and new energy vehicle insurance. This is a rebalancing from "scale first" to "quality first."
ZA Online's operations are stable, but the market still cannot help but have concerns: as Ou Yaping's equity rises and his control strengthens, the room for imagination in capital operations has opened up.
Before that, Ou Yaping had already released signals of capital operations. The first signal was the privatization of Z Fin. In July this year, Z Fin, renamed from Baishida Holdings, announced it planned to privatize and withdraw its listing status by way of a scheme of arrangement.
As Z Fin's controlling shareholder, Ou Yaping is taking this listed platform back under private control, and this occurred almost at the same time as the family equity consolidation.
The second is the acquisition of a real estate project. In April 2024, ZA Online announced it would acquire two properties in the Rockbund project by the Bund in Huangpu, Shanghai, for nearly 1.437 billion yuan.
The Rockbund project was jointly developed by Baishida and the Rockefeller Group. It was launched in 2005 and only fully opened in 2023, during which Baishida bore the main funding pressure. Although ZA Online publicly denied that the acquisition was directly related to Ou Yaping, it was still seen by the outside world as an asset injection and related-party transaction.
These signals point to a market speculation: Ou Yaping's control over the ZA ecosystem is strengthening, and capital operations at his listed platforms may also be entering a new stage.
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