Produced by | Damo Finance
After four years, the “Ping An Health” app has been renamed back to “Ping An Good Doctor”.
On June 10, Ping An Good Doctor (1833.HK) officially announced its brand renewal, reusing “Ping An Good Doctor” as its external brand name. In the following two trading days, the stock price of Ping An Good Doctor rose consecutively, with a cumulative increase of 12.33%. By the close on June 12, the company’s stock price was HKD 8.11 per share, with a total market value of HKD 17.5 billion.
Ping An Good Doctor was established in 2014 as an internet healthcare company under the Ping An Group. The company developed rapidly after its establishment and successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018.
However, just before its listing, Ping An Good Doctor was sued by Sichuan-based Good Doctor Pharmaceutical, claiming that Ping An Good Doctor infringed on its trademark rights. The Chengdu Intermediate Court and the Sichuan High Court both ruled in favor of Good Doctor Pharmaceutical in the first and second trials, respectively, finding Ping An Good Doctor guilty of infringement.
After losing both cases, Ping An Good Doctor had to pay a compensation of 3 million yuan to Good Doctor Pharmaceutical and issued a public apology in May 2020. In January 2021, the “Ping An Good Doctor” app was renamed to “Ping An Health”.
However, Ping An Good Doctor did not give up; the case eventually reached the Supreme People’s Court. At the end of 2024, the Supreme Court ruled to overturn the previous first and second trial judgments and dismissed all claims from Good Doctor Pharmaceutical.
According to the judgment, the Supreme Court determined that the internet medical services provided by the Ping An Good Doctor app are significantly different from the traditional drug manufacturing and sales business of Good Doctor Pharmaceutical in terms of business model, customer acquisition channels, and service content. Therefore, Good Doctor Pharmaceutical’s claims of trademark infringement against Ping An Good Doctor were not established.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling, Ping An Good Doctor was able to rename the “Ping An Health” app back to “Ping An Good Doctor”. This renaming may carry the company’s ambition to regain its C-end business.
Business Has Already Transformed
As an internet healthcare company, Ping An Good Doctor’s initial strategy was similar to other internet medical platforms, focusing on providing internet diagnosis and treatment services to C-end customers and developing pharmaceutical e-commerce. In 2020, the revenue from Ping An Good Doctor’s pharmaceutical e-commerce (health mall) business was 3.714 billion yuan, accounting for 54.09% of total revenue.
During this period, the company accumulated a large user base through the “Ping An Good Doctor” brand. According to company announcements, by early January 2021, the registered users of the “Ping An Good Doctor” app had reached 346 million, with 67 million monthly active users, making it the most widely used mobile medical application in the country.
However, compared to Alibaba Health and JD Health, which are backed by comprehensive e-commerce platforms, Ping An Good Doctor’s self-operated pharmaceutical e-commerce has relatively higher costs. In 2020, the gross profit margin of the company’s pharmaceutical e-commerce business was only 6.9%, while JD Health’s overall gross profit margin was 25.4% and Alibaba Health’s was 23.3%. Against this backdrop, Ping An Good Doctor continued to fall into a vortex of losses.
To escape the losses, Ping An Good Doctor began to make changes. In May 2020, the company replaced its founder and chairman Wang Tao, who came from Alibaba, with veteran Fang Weihua from Ping An. With Fang Weihua’s appointment, the company’s strategic direction began to change. The company reduced its pharmaceutical e-commerce business and fully focused on B-end enterprise users, while also expanding its business to F-end users in conjunction with the group’s life insurance reforms.
It was also during this period, influenced by the lawsuit with Good Doctor Pharmaceutical, that Ping An Good Doctor changed the name of its app to “Ping An Health”. At that time, the company used this event to express its determination for reform, stating in its announcement that the renaming was to reflect the company’s strategic upgrade, and in the future, the company would focus on healthcare + health.
In the following years, Ping An Good Doctor entered a difficult strategic transformation period. For the company, abandoning the easily scalable pharmaceutical e-commerce business would reduce losses, but it would also lead to a decline in revenue, and developing F-end and B-end businesses would also require time to achieve stable profitability. As a result, from 2021 to 2023, Ping An Good Doctor’s operating revenue fell from 7.334 billion yuan to 4.674 billion yuan, and the company continued to record losses during this period.
In October 2023, Li Dou replaced Fang Weihua as the new leader of Ping An Good Doctor. At the beginning of Li Dou’s leadership, the company’s policy remained focused on developing F-end and B-end businesses, with further efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
In 2024, Ping An Good Doctor’s sales and marketing expenses were 764 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8.6%, and management expenses were 930 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 37.2%. The company’s employee count also dropped from 2,556 at the end of 2022 to 1,563, reducing nearly a thousand employees.
With significant cost reduction and efficiency improvement, Ping An Good Doctor finally achieved profitability. In 2024, the company’s operating revenue was 4.808 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.88%; net profit attributable to the parent company was 81 million yuan, successfully turning a profit.
However, after years of transformation, Ping An Good Doctor’s business has become highly dependent on the “blood transfusion” from the Ping An Group. In 2024, the company’s F-end and B-end revenues were 2.417 billion yuan and 1.431 billion yuan, respectively, accounting for 80.03% of total revenue.
The annual report shows that Ping An Good Doctor’s F-end business serves individual comprehensive financial customers from the Ping An Group’s medical and elderly care ecosystem. On the B-end side, as of the end of 2024, the company had served a total of 2,049 enterprise clients, of which 86% came from the Ping An Group’s channels.
Under this model, the future growth space for Ping An Good Doctor may be limited. For example, on the B-end enterprise client side, by the end of 2024, the number of enterprise clients served by the company increased by over 500 compared to the end of 2023, a growth rate of 35.9%. However, by the end of the first quarter of 2025, this number only increased to over 2,100, with a significant slowdown in growth compared to 2024.
To find new performance growth points, Ping An Good Doctor has put the development of C-end business back on the agenda. In its 2024 annual report, the company stated that as user habits develop, it will further promote F2C/B2C growth, creating a second growth curve.
The company’s renaming of the “Ping An Health” business back to “Ping An Good Doctor” may also be an attempt to leverage brand effects to attract more C-end users. However, after four years of transformation towards F-end and B-end, how much utility the once well-known “Ping An Good Doctor” brand can still provide in the C-end business remains to be seen.
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