Ma Mingzhe

Ma Mingzhe is the founder and chairman of Ping An. He was born in December 1955. According to a 2018 report by Caixin, Ma Mingzhe had by then been at the helm of Ping An for 30 years, leading this regional insurer, which started out in Shekou, Shenzhen, with registered capital of only 42 million yuan, to become a financial group covering insurance, trusts, banking, securities, funds and other major business lines, with total assets of 6.5 trillion yuan at the end of 2017; the report said that people within Ping An believed Ma Mingzhe should be able to work for another ten years, but that the company had also reached the point where it needed to consider succession and the future path of corporate governance.

Around 2017, Ping An was very active in logistics real estate. According to a report by the Economic Observer in August 2017, Ma Mingzhe had issued a directive requiring Shenzhen Ping An Real Estate Industrial Logistics Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Ping An, to seize logistics market share as quickly as possible. The report said that within two and a half years Ping An Real Estate had bought large amounts of logistics land across the country, invested in 28 companies, and, through acquisitions or self-development, formed about 30 parks nationwide with a total area of 4 million square metres, among which the Chengdu Airport project and the Shanghai Lingang cold storage facility were relatively well known. Ping An Group’s investment department also designed a real estate fund model, bringing in operating companies as partners at industrial park bases and trying to play the role of asset manager. The same report noted that Ping An regarded GLP as the company to catch up with: most of its logistics bases were sited near GLP logistics bases, senior staff at its logistics parks mostly came from within the Ping An system, and many frontline employees came from GLP. In terms of market share, GLP still held an absolute lead in China’s industrial logistics market.

In April 2018, reports circulated in the market that Zhu Congjiu, vice governor of Zhejiang Province, would become chairman of Ping An Group, and Ping An Group denied the rumour that same afternoon after a board meeting. According to Caixin’s reporting at the time, the background to the rumour was related to changes in Ping An’s shareholding structure: after HSBC sold its entire 15.57% stake in Ping An H shares in December 2012, Caixin reported that the actual investor was Xiao Jianhua of the “Tomorrow Group”; as of the end of the first quarter of 2018, the four related SPVs still held 9.55% of Ping An, making them the single largest shareholder, while Hua Xia Life held a further 1.62%. Over the same period, China Securities Finance Corporation held 4.44% and Central Huijin held 2.68%. The report said that if the shares held by the “Tomorrow Group” were ultimately disposed of and transferred to state-owned institutions, then together with the holdings of China Securities Finance Corporation and the National Social Security Fund, Ping An’s largest shareholder would become a state-owned institution, and the choice of chairman might be decided by the state or state-owned shareholders. The report also mentioned that Ma Mingzhe had previously approached several large state-owned financial institutions to discuss arrangements for taking stakes.

In 2018, at the interim results press conference, Ma Mingzhe spoke highly of Ping An Bank’s transformation results, mainly in three respects: first, structural adjustment, from corporate business accounting for more than 70% of revenue three years earlier to retail business accounting for 68%; second, corporate business had been reduced by several hundred billion yuan and asset quality had fundamentally improved; and third, the bank’s strategy of technology-empowered finance had become clearer. In September of the same year, Ping An Asset Management Co., Ltd. disbanded its active equity investment team and switched to quantitative investment, which was seen as the result of Ma Mingzhe’s repeated calls to embrace new technology, strengthen risk control, and cut costs and raise efficiency.

In 2021, Ma Mingzhe first put forward the “three savings” concept of “saving worry, saving time and saving money”, emphasising that all kinds of financial and lifestyle services for customers should be resolved in one stop, so that customers enjoy an integrated financial consumption experience of “saving worry, saving time and saving money” thanks to Ping An’s professional services. As of the end of December 2024, Ping An had 242 million customers.

As early as 2007, Ma Mingzhe’s “sky-high annual salary” of 66 million yuan triggered enormous public debate and attention. After that, the pay of Ping An executives entered a downward path, but remained highly competitive within the insurance industry. In 2022, on top of further pay cuts compared with the previous year, three Ping An executives received pay in the ten-million-yuan range; Ma Mingzhe’s pay for the period was 6.78 million yuan, ranking seventh among the company’s executives.

In 2023, Ping An’s shareholding was relatively dispersed; legally it had neither a controlling shareholder nor an actual controller or ultimate beneficiary. The only shareholders holding more than 5% (directly and indirectly) were Charoen Pokphand Group Company Limited (6.52%) and Shenzhen Investment Holdings Co., Ltd. (5.27%). After former chief financial officer Yao Bo left, only three executive directors remained besides Ma Mingzhe: general manager and co-CEO Xie Yonglin, co-CEO and executive deputy general manager Chen Xinying, and deputy general manager Cai Fangfang.