Is Medical AI caught in a "storytelling" controversy? Yingkang Life General Manager Ma Anjie: Large models are disrupting the medical "Impossible Triangle"

Ask AI · How can medical large models solve the resource scarcity problem?

The reporter from ：Peng Fei    The editor from ：Wei Wenyi

At a time when the domestic private healthcare industry is under overall pressure and the market shakeout is accelerating, Kang Life (SZ300143, share price 13.17 yuan, market cap 9.87 billion yuan), with cancer medical services at its core, has turned in an annual performance report that shows a striking contrast.

On the evening of March 27, Kang Life released its 2025 annual report, showing that the company’s revenue grew at a double-digit rate throughout the year, and both its non-recurring profits attributable to the parent (excluding non-recurring items) and operating cash flow saw year-on-year growth of nearly 30%. However, 《Daily Economic News》 reporters (hereinafter “the reporters”) noticed that Kang Life’s net profit attributable to shareholders (attributable to the parent) actually fell by more than 40% year-on-year.

Behind the divergence in performance: is it a survival game under the industry cycle, or a strategic trade-off in corporate transformation? At a media briefing held on the morning of March 29 to discuss the 2025 annual report, Kang Life’s general manager, Ma Anjie, provided an in-depth interpretation of the industry logic behind the results and the company’s transformation strategy.

How to interpret the performance contrast of “revenue growth but profit decline”?

According to Kang Life’s 2025 annual report, the company achieved full-year operating revenue of about 1.89B yuan, up 20.93% year-on-year, and its compound annual growth rate over the past five years reached 23.32%.

Image source: Kang Life’s 2025 annual report

From a business segment perspective, in 2025, revenue from the company’s core medical services business segment was 8B yuan, up 25.93% year-on-year; revenue from the medical devices segment for the full year was 384 million yuan, up 4.69%.

Compared with double-digit revenue growth, however, the company’s net profit attributable to shareholders fell by more than 40% to about 68.54 million yuan. When asked about profit stability, Ma Anjie offered an interpretation from a different perspective.

“The net profit attributable to shareholders excluding non-recurring items is the true underlying color of the company’s operations.” Ma Anjie pointed out that fluctuations in net profit attributable to shareholders mainly came from the performance of the acquired target, Shengnuo Medical, exceeding the agreed targets, which triggered the originally planned consideration adjustment provisions. The impact of this provision is a one-off adjustment of non-operating items. In other words, this is not a decline in performance—instead, it actually confirms the strong profitability of the acquisition target, and this profitability has continued long-term beneficial implications for the company’s development.

The reporters noted that, if this non-recurring profit and loss item is excluded, Kang Life’s net profit attributable to shareholders excluding non-recurring items for 2025 was about 107 million yuan, up 28.50% year-on-year.

To evaluate a company’s operating resilience more accurately, Ma Anjie suggested investors focus on three key metrics: net profit attributable to shareholders excluding one-off items; operating cash flow reflecting the company’s self “cash-generating” ability; and improvements in benefits enabled by AI (artificial intelligence).

Data show that in 2025, Kang Life’s net cash flow from operating activities was about 341 million yuan, up 31.47% year-on-year. In addition, with AI enabling, the company’s consolidated expense ratio improved by 1.2 percentage points versus the same period, and both per-capita service volume and bed turnover efficiency increased steadily.

In Ma Anjie’s view, this fully proves that AI is not only a cutting-edge concept—it has already been converted into a moat for stable profitability.

Can AI large models break the “impossible triangle” in healthcare?

For a long time, the private healthcare industry has been trapped in the “impossible triangle” of “high quality, low cost, broad coverage.” The scarcity of high-quality medical resources and the continuous growth in residents’ health needs create an irreconcilable structural contradiction.

In Ma Anjie’s view, the rise of AI large models has been regarded across the entire industry as the only way to break the deadlock. At the same time, however, healthcare AI is still generally in an exploratory stage. Most companies’ AI initiatives remain at the concept level and have difficulty providing substantive support for performance. Doubts about “AI telling stories” have always accompanied the industry.

In its 2025 annual report, Kang Life also explicitly mentioned that AI-related businesses have not yet formed a major impact on the company’s short-term performance.

At the media briefing, Ma Anjie said directly that Kang Life’s AI layout is not following the trend for hype; over five years, it has completed three full stages: foundational digitalization, AI tool applications, and AI scenario product development. The core of 2025 is to embed AI deeply into the entire diagnosis and treatment workflow, truly solving the industry’s core pain points.

“Our AI is not a standalone ToB (business-facing) product or platform—it is fully embedded into the entire business workflow. Its value is already clearly reflected in the statements.” Ma Anjie gave an example: after Suzhou Guangci Hospital introduced an AI radiology diagnostic agent, radiology diagnostic reports that previously required 7 doctors to complete for more than 500 inpatient patients across the hospital now can be covered by only 2.5 doctors, while the missed-diagnosis rate has dropped significantly.

Regarding the AI commercialization timetable that the market cares most about, Ma Anjie also laid out a path. He said that, at the current stage, the value of AI is mainly reflected in improving efficiency of existing businesses and enabling capabilities. The company’s self-developed oncology full-cycle management agent is precisely the core carrier of future AI commercialization—this AI application for the vertical oncology patient domain aims to break the traditional dependence of medical institutions on beds, specialists, and so on, transforming passive health management into a new care model of active sensing, active prediction, and active management.

“Our core KPI in 2026 is the user usage volume of AI service products. Only when users form stable usage habits can we achieve the transformation from one-time users to lifelong users. In the future, AI services represented by the oncology health management agent will form an independent business, becoming the company’s growth driver.” Ma Anjie said.

How does a “100-day integration” model help ride out the industry cycle?

Against the backdrop of overall contraction in the private healthcare industry, industry M&A is showing an extremely polarized pattern: most companies pause external expansion due to operating pressure, even selling assets to bring cash flow back, while leading companies are entering a window period for consolidation against the trend.

At the same time, the phenomenon of “easy to do M&A, hard to integrate” in healthcare has always existed. Goodwill impairment, insufficient business synergy versus expectations, and building scale without capability improvement have become the biggest pitfalls in healthcare M&A.

The reporters’ review found that since 2021, Kang Life has completed multiple M&A projects at the scale of over 1.5B yuan. For example, in 2025, Kang Life completed the acquisition of Changsha Kerxin Oncology Hospital. Previously, Kang Life also acquired Shengnuo Medical, Uni Instruments and other companies, continuously improving its layout across the two major segments of medical services and medical devices.

In a cycle where the industry is generally conservative, how does Kang Life avoid common risks in healthcare M&A?

“We screen M&A targets and always adhere to three core matching principles. We refuse any blind M&A for the sake of scale.” Ma Anjie explained the company’s M&A logic in detail at the media briefing: First is strategic matching—no matter how good the company is, if it does not align with the company’s strategy of transforming into an AI-enabled proactive health ecosystem platform, it will not be considered; second is resource matching—both whether the company itself can support the integration and operating management after the acquisition, and whether the target’s resources can form synergy with the company to create returns that meet expectations; third is capability matching—the best target is one where both sides in the same domain and different directions form complementary strengths, realizing a two-way drive rather than integration difficulties caused by a large disparity in capabilities.

As for the most challenging post-investment integration in the industry, Kang Life has already formed a systemized “100-day integration” model, enabling the acquired targets across the entire value chain through four dimensions: cultural integration, management upgrades, resource synergy, and platform enablement.

The data confirm the effectiveness of this integration system. For example, after the acquisition, at Changsha Kerxin Oncology Hospital, the completion rate of performance commitments in 2025 reached 106.75%, patient volume increased 64% year-on-year, and surgical volume increased 38% year-on-year. The hospital was consolidated for more than half a year; based on full-bed operations, admissions increased 16% year-on-year, and volume of surgeries at levels III and IV increased nearly 40%. In addition, the medical devices segment formed a “large infusion” product matrix through acquisitions, and relied on the company’s globalized channel to achieve a rapid breakthrough in overseas markets, becoming a stable support for growth in performance.

“The core of M&A has never been just an increase in numbers on the financial statements; it’s whether capabilities can be grafted and amplified.” Ma Anjie said that what the company values is never simply assembling scale, but whether it can amplify the acquired party’s core capabilities within the system, and replicate the company’s core capabilities—such as refined management, AI technology enablement, and globalized channels—into the acquired targets, achieving a synergistic effect of “one plus one greater than two.” This is the core capability for medical enterprises to navigate through the industry cycle.

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