In August 2022, foreign-owned property insurer Samsung Property Insurance welcomed a strategic investor when Tencent's subsidiary Shenzhen Tencent Network Computer Network Co., Ltd. invested approximately 280 million yuan in a capital increase, securing a 32% stake to become the company's second-largest shareholder. This move not only marked Samsung Property Insurance's transition from a purely foreign-owned model to a joint venture structure, but also set the stage for a fundamental technological transformation.
Following the Tencent-affiliated capital investment, Samsung Property Insurance quickly aligned its governance structure. In August 2022, senior Tencent advisor Ren Huichuan took over as interim head of Samsung Property Insurance, and was appointed chairman in June 2023, driving the company's strategy toward technology-driven operations.
In terms of business synergy, cooperation between the two parties extended from capital level to technological infrastructure. Starting in late 2022, Samsung Property Insurance launched a comprehensive cloud migration plan with support from Tencent Cloud. To date, the company has achieved full migration of all core systems to the cloud, becoming the first property insurance company in China to complete full core system migration to the cloud. Simultaneously, the core system database smoothly transitioned from Oracle to Tencent Cloud's domestic database TDSQL-PG, marking the substantial implementation phase of technological transformation.
"Small and medium-sized insurers must rely on technology to improve efficiency and accelerate innovation to survive fierce competition," said Li Hao, General Manager of Samsung Property Insurance. He emphasized that sacrificing short-term profits for long-term technology investment is an inevitable choice.
**Joining the Tencent Ecosystem to Reconstruct Systems**
Samsung Property Insurance has been a "pioneer" in the foreign property insurance sector. In 1995, South Korea's Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance established a representative office in Beijing, and obtained its corporate business license in April 2005, successfully becoming the first foreign-owned property insurance company in China. In May 2010, the company was renamed from Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance (China) Co., Ltd. to Samsung Property Insurance (China) Co., Ltd.
In August 2022, this established foreign insurer reached a critical turning point—through capital increase introducing Tencent-affiliated capital, transforming from foreign-owned to Sino-foreign joint venture, officially joining the Tencent ecosystem.
Subsequently, Samsung Property Insurance reached strategic cooperation with Tencent, launching a system reconstruction project covering comprehensive upgrades of infrastructure, core business systems, and data capabilities, fully supporting the company's rapid business development in the new phase.
"The early system only had Korean and English versions with limited business carrying capacity," admitted Li Hao, who became General Manager in early 2023. The team was determined to start from scratch, spending two years rebuilding core systems including underwriting, claims, and finance.
For small companies to overcome limitations, they must rely on system and technological advancement. Resource support from the Tencent ecosystem became crucial driving force for this transformation.
In February 2023, Samsung Property Insurance partnered with Tencent Cloud to focus on new business cloud migration, transferring emerging businesses such as accidental health insurance, internet channels, and big data platforms to the cloud while building multi-active systems. By June 2024, Samsung Property Insurance's cloud-based new businesses stabilized, with focus shifting to building cloud-based dual-active centers to enhance business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
In March 2025, full system cloud migration and core system Oracle removal commenced. Samsung Property Insurance established cloud-based disaster recovery centers, completing integration of original disaster recovery centers and partial IDC resources, reducing annual operation and maintenance costs by nearly 15%.
"Previously, insurers typically migrated only non-core systems, but Samsung Property Insurance achieved full core system cloud migration, breaking traditional model limitations. Given the high complexity of property insurance business, especially auto insurance, Samsung Property Insurance's validation of full business volume in the cloud demonstrates cloud technology's capability to handle complex business operations," noted Sun Lei, Insurance Industry Architect at Tencent Cloud. Samsung Property Insurance's successful practice of full core system cloud migration and cloud architecture upgrade provides a referenceable cloud migration model for the property insurance industry.
**Technology Breakthrough for Insurer Survival**
As a foreign-owned property insurance company, Samsung Property Insurance had maintained a "small but refined" operation despite years in the Chinese insurance market, with premium income below 1 billion yuan in 2022.
Financial data shows that in 2024, Samsung Property Insurance achieved insurance business revenue of 21.32 billion yuan, representing 93% growth compared to 11.02 billion yuan in 2023. The previous business structure dominated by enterprise property insurance and auto insurance was disrupted. Return shipping insurance jumped to become the largest insurance category with over 400 million yuan in premiums, liability insurance grew more than threefold year-over-year, and accidental health insurance also contributed significant incremental volume, demonstrating explosive potential in consumer business.
Against the backdrop of rapid digitalization and increasingly fierce competition in the insurance industry, insurers cannot rely solely on efficiency improvements in single business lines to maintain market advantages. Instead, they need innovative development integrating business models with IT technology.
Li Hao emphasized: "In the current environment of homogenized insurance products, insurance companies' competitiveness actually reflects differences in operational capabilities. For small and medium insurers, the core support for operational capability is technology."
Li Hao further explained that consumer business has characteristics of fragmentation and significant traffic fluctuations. Traditional insurance companies' approach to handling these issues is the "add people, add overtime" model, which many companies still employ. Upgrading from centralized architecture to cloud-native architecture enables elastic resource scaling to handle business peaks.
"Volume is no longer a bottleneck for us, which has tremendous impact on our human resource allocation, financial smoothing, and cost management."
"Small and medium companies should have higher requirements for new technology applications," Li Hao believes. Companies should leverage technology to achieve excellence in every aspect from underwriting to claims processing, thereby solving cost issues. For example, deep AI integration can improve operational efficiency. In telephone sales quality control, AI quality inspection replacing manual inspection enables 24-hour continuous monitoring, significantly improving quality control timeliness while helping traditional property insurers reduce costs by 50%-60%.
The value of technology investment is gradually becoming apparent. Stable operation of cloud systems has driven cost structure optimization, while the construction of WeChat ecosystem closed-loop paves the way for innovation in scenarios such as policy services and car owner ecosystems.
However, due to rapid growth in operating expenses driven by technology investment, Samsung Property Insurance remains in a "revenue growth without profit growth" state of minimal profitability in recent years. Whether the cost-reduction effects of technology-driven transformation can translate into profit growth will be the key test of its transformation success.
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