Authored by Zhan Hao (zhanhao@anjielaw.com) and Sharif Hendry (sharifhendry@anjielaw.com) at AnJie Law Firm.
The Chinese insurance market continues to grow unabated. While structural changes have seen a drop-off in infrastructure investment and its corresponding high levels of GDP growth, the services sector, and finance in particular, is growing strongly. This shift towards a knowledge based, digital economy is fuelling growth not only in IT, pharmaceuticals and banking, but also insurance .This growth is in line with the government’s plan to target a doubling of the rate of insurance penetration (insurance premiums as a percentage of GDP) from its previous level of around 2.4% to 5% by 2020 . By this point it is expected that insurance premium income will have reached 4.5 trillion RMB, with total industry assets of 25 trillion RMB. If this aim comes to fruition, it would mean the Chinese insurance market usurping the US to become the world’s largest insurance market .