1,696 insurance asset management products’ average return rate in the first half of the year was 9.89%.

By reporter Yang Xiaohan

The performance of insurance asset management institutions for the first half of the year has been released. According to Wind data, as of July 3, 1,696 portfolio-style insurance asset management products had disclosed their annualized returns for the first half of the year (hereinafter “returns”). The data show that among the 1,696 portfolio-style insurance asset management products, 1,413 achieved positive returns, accounting for 83.3%; 3 products had returns of 0; and 280 products had negative returns.

Experts interviewed said they expect that in the future insurance funds will continue to adopt dividend-focused strategies as a main allocation direction, and the equity asset allocation ratio is expected to keep increasing.

Strong overall profitability

Insurance asset management products generally include debt investment plans, equity investment plans, portfolio-type products, and other products stipulated by regulatory rules. Among different categories of insurance asset management products, currently only portfolio-type insurance asset management products disclose net value data, making them an important reference for market observers to assess the investment capabilities of insurance asset management companies.

Overall, the average first-half return of 1,696 products was 9.89%, up 4.18 percentage points year on year; the median was 2.91%, down 0.09 percentage points year on year.

Depending on the portfolio structure, portfolio-type insurance asset management products are further divided into fixed-income, equity, hybrid, and commodity and financial derivatives categories, among others. Since the number of commodity and financial derivatives category products is relatively small, the market mainly focuses on the returns of fixed-income, equity, and hybrid products.

By major category, among 1,187 fixed-income products, 1,083 achieved positive returns, accounting for 91.2%. The average return of the 1,187 products was 3.37%, down 0.04 percentage points year on year; the median return was 2.83%, up 0.19 percentage points year on year.

Among 285 equity-category products, 190 achieved positive returns, accounting for 66.7%. The average return of the 285 products was 31.78%, up 19.73 percentage points year on year; the median was 18.14%, up 8.34 percentage points year on year.

Among 224 hybrid-category products, 140 achieved positive returns, accounting for 62.5%. The highest-return product was “Guoshou Asset—Ruijin Xinzhichuangke Technology No. 1,” with a return of 200.51%; the lowest-return product was “Everbright Sun Life Jingyou Stable No. 22,” with a return of -33.51%. The average return of the 224 products was 16.57%, up 7.04 percentage points year on year; the median was 5.79%, down 1.18 percentage points year on year.

In this regard, Zhou Jin, a partner of Tianzhi International Financial Industry Consulting, told Securities Daily reporters that in the first half of this year, the overall profitability of insurance asset management products was impressive. Among them, fixed-income products, as the basic allocation for insurance funds, deliver stable returns; equity products, as the incremental “thickening” portion, benefited mainly from the performance of the capital markets, contributing the bulk of the increase.

Zhang Lingjia, president of Guangdong Keli Capital Management Co., Ltd., told Securities Daily reporters that it is worth noting that for portfolio-style insurance asset management products, the gap between the first-half average and median is large—especially for equity-category products, where the average gap exceeds 10 percentage points. This indicates that returns are concentrated in the top “narrow-band” offerings, and the return uplift comes from a structural market行情 in the stock market, rather than a broadly-based market行情.

Equity allocation ratio increases

In recent years, insurance funds have continuously increased their allocation to equity assets.

Data from the National Financial Regulatory Administration show that as of the end of the first quarter of this year, the balance of insurers’ funds allocated to equity assets (stocks, securities investment funds, and long-term equity investments) totaled 8.88 trillion yuan, up 343.5 billion yuan from the end of 2025. The investment proportions of stocks, securities investment funds, and long-term equity investments all increased.

In response, Zhou Jin said that regulators have introduced supporting measures for insurers’ “long-term entry into the market,” including long-cycle evaluation standards and adjustments to solvency rules, which has significantly increased insurers’ motivation to add equity investments in the secondary market. At the same time, from an insurer’s perspective on returns, as the interest rate center continues to move down, return expectations for fixed-income assets keep declining and reinvestment risk rises. Meanwhile, alternative assets have greater risk and reduced supply; therefore, increasing equity investment is an inevitable choice for insurance funds.

Zhang Lingjia reminded that currently, the market’s high-expectation structural行情 is concentrated in AI-related semiconductor equity assets. In terms of attributes, they are technology growth assets; but insurance funds are long-term liability funds. If the market experiences a rapid pullback, the act of reducing positions itself will amplify volatility. Also, on the liability side, dividend insurance has already raised return expectations, so insurance funds need to take the relevant measures to prevent the risk of interest spread losses caused by a return reversal.

From the survey, financial institutions have some expectation of a pullback in the stock market行情. The 2026 second-quarter banking and insurance asset management industry investment confidence index released by the China Banking and Insurance Asset Management Association shows that this year’s second-quarter fixed-income investment confidence index for insurance institutions was 50.72, and the equity investment confidence index was 53.55, both down on a quarter-on-quarter basis compared with the first quarter overall.

Looking ahead to insurers’ investment strategy in the second half of the year, a relevant responsible person from China Life Investment and Insurance Asset Management Co., Ltd. said that against the backdrop of the comprehensive implementation of the new financial instruments accounting standards, dividend-focused strategies remain an important allocation direction for insurance funds. The equity allocation ratio is expected to continue to increase. By using S funds, industrial funds, and other approaches to deeply bind to the new-quality productive forces track, insurers can achieve steady value growth across cycles.

(Editor: Qian Xiaorui)

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