Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In a portable cabin on the rural outskirts of Shanghai, the bodies are first laid in front of white bouquets, the traditional mourning colour in China, before being taken to a specially designed brick furnace.
Afterwards, the ashes are stored in a separate cabin filled with urns, a statue of a Buddhist deity and photographs chosen by their owners.
Scarcely a decade after a modern pet industry emerged in China, millions of cats and dogs are entering old age. From largely unregulated funerals costing more than Rmb1,000 ($140) to specialised pet nutrition and diagnostic tools, families and businesses are adjusting to the demographic shift.
Spending on pets hit Rmb300bn ($42bn) last year, up 7.5 per cent on the previous year, according to a report by pet sector data company Beijing Paidu. Their ageing is just one of the many opportunities across China’s vast and gradually maturing consumer market, even as its economy enters a slower-growth era.
“The first generation of pets is getting old, so future consumption will all be about pet health,” said Guo Weike, chief operating officer at PetKit, a company that originally specialised in automated pet feeding and litters, but is now also focusing on diagnosis and testing.
Pet numbers boomed in China as the country urbanised, restrictions relaxed and people had more disposable income. Weak birth rates have contributed to a shrinking human population in each of the past three years, with the pet food market approaching the size of the infant milk formula market. Cats and dogs outnumber toddlers, according to estimates used by the pet sector report and Goldman Sachs.
The report puts the pet population at 120mn in urban areas across the country, at the higher end of estimates. It adds that 28 per cent of dogs are more than seven years old, and about 10 per cent of cats are more than eight years old.
A 2021 report by consultancy iResearch forecast that “a large number of dogs will enter old age [above eight] from 2022 to 2026”, and many cats will enter old age [above 10] from 2023 to 2029. By 2025, it is estimated there would be more than 50mn old-aged dogs and cats in total.
The first pet hospitals emerged in the 1990s, but it was not until around 2015 that professional breeding methods became normalised and “capital entered the industry”, said Zhang Changli, a vet in Chengdu.
When Zhang started working 10 years ago, between 70 and 80 per cent of the animals he treated were young, but now about 40 per cent of them are middle-aged or old. Pet funeral services, he added, had sprung up “like mushrooms after rain”.
Companies are “specialising in products for ageing pets”, said Eric Lin, a director at brand consultancy the Silk Initiative, including a market for supplements. China’s pet food market is expected to hit $12bn by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs, which calls it one of the “fastest-growing consumer sectors in China”.
Purchases of pets were increasingly driven by fashion, Lin added. “If you look at the breed of a pet, you can almost estimate their age because that’s when everyone gets one of those,” he said, citing a craze for corgis in 2018.
Pet funerals, he added, had taken off “all of a sudden” and in the past people “didn’t really knowhow to deal with it [the death of a pet]”. They were also popular in Japan and South Korea, he said, and young owners might post about them on social media.
“50 or 60-year-olds . . . probably won’t spend money on pet funerals, but the young generation will,” he said. This is “the end of the first generation who conceived of pets as a family [member]”.
Jiang Ziyue, a 30-year-old publisher in the city of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, has a 17-year-old dog. “It would be 100 years old if it were human,” he said. His dog usually “eats rice”, he added. “We just feed it whatever we eat.”
They live on the ninth floor of an apartment block and Jiang has “to carry him down every morning to take him on a walk”. While he has heard about pet funerals, he does not expect to use such a service for his own dog. “When he leaves one day, I think, for both of us, it will be a relief.”
