Flower Finance Original
After 61 years, the Chinese has undergone tremendous changes.
According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the national population at the end of 2022 was 141175 million, 850,000 less than at the end of the previous year, and the first negative growth since 1961.
In the same period, the annual birth population was 9.56 million, and the birth rate was 6.77‰; The number of deaths was 10.41 million, and the death rate was 7.37‰; The natural population growth rate is -0.60‰.
The size of the elderly population continues to rise. At the end of 2022, the working-age population aged 16-59 was 876 million, accounting for 62%, down 0.5 percentage points from 2021.
The mainland population aged 65 and above was 210 million, accounting for 14.9% of the national population, an increase of 0.7 percentage points over 2021.
In the face of a historic turn in the Chinese situation in 2022, what far-reaching impact will this have on the mainland's industrial economy?
Fertility intentions remain low
Looking at the global market, negative population growth is not uncommon, and many developed countries are experiencing negative population growth.
According to the 2022 World Population Prospects data released by the United Nations, in 2021, 38 countries were experiencing negative endogenous population growth, and their negative growth was mainly due to long-term low fertility.
Although economic growth and improved medical care can continue to drive up human life expectancy, the elderly population continues to rise, making it inevitable that deaths will rise.
If we want to prevent the decline of the population, the key is to increase the number of births. However, with the development of the economy and the improvement of the level of education, the cost of having children is rising sharply, and it is a common law in the world that the willingness to have children has declined.
At this stage, more and more couples of childbearing age are caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, there is the high cost of living, and on the other hand, the high cost of parenting.
According to the data of the "China Fertility Cost Report 2022 Edition", the average cost of raising children aged 0-17 in mainland families is 485,000 yuan, urban families are about 630,000 yuan, and rural families are about 300,000 yuan.
Specifically, the highest cost of parenting is Shanghai, which is as high as 1.03 million yuan. Beijing, ranked second, is also as high as 970,000 yuan.
The high cost of housing, childcare, education and other costs undoubtedly further inhibits young people's willingness to have children. In today's high-cost era, the cost of having a child is rising like a high price.
In this context, the willingness of the younger generation to have children also continues to decline. According to a 2021 survey by the National Health Commission, the average number of children intended by women of childbearing age was 1.64, down from 1.76 in 2017.
The number of new births in the mainland has also declined since 2017, and has been in a negative growth state for many consecutive years. From 2017 to 2022, they will be 17.23 million, 15.23 million, 14.65 million, 12.02 million, 10.62 million and 9.56 million respectively, with an average annual decrease of more than 1 million.
The slowdown in the growth of the number of births, and even continued to decline after 2017, has become the biggest headwind for the infant formula market. According to Euromonitor International data and estimates, the size of the mainland infant powder market in 2021 will be about 158.7 billion yuan, down 6% year-on-year.
There are also toy industries, education industries and real estate industries, etc., which may be affected one by one. In South Korea, for example, thousands of kindergartens are quietly disappearing as the number of births continues to decline. According to media reports, nearly 7,000 kindergartens in South Korea have closed their doors in the past five years, accounting for 17% of the total.
Ageing business opportunities
Affected by the negative population growth and the intensification of aging, it has brought a lot of double burden of "upper age and lower childcare" to young people.
According to Zeping macro data, the old-age dependency ratio in 2020 was 19.7%, and it is expected to exceed 50% in 2050, which means that every two young people need to support an elderly person. Raising the elderly and raising children is costly, and young people will be under pressure on both ends.
With the acceleration of population aging, the pressure on pensions to maintain balance of payments is gradually increasing. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' "China Pension Actuarial Report 2019-2050", the pension income will be indefensible in 2028, and the accumulated balance will be exhausted by 2035.
However, in the context of aging population, the future growth rate of some industries may be rapidly developed, with medium and long-term growth space.
According to the data of the White Paper on Consumption Habits of the Elderly in China, the consumption expenditure of the elderly group in mainland China is mainly concentrated in four aspects: entertainment and social networking, disease management, health and daily life.
Among them, daily life consumption accounted for 69%, health and wellness accounted for 12%, entertainment and social networking accounted for 11%, and disease management was 7%. From the perspective of consumption details, food and catering, daily necessities, tourism, clothing and accessories are the top four expenditures, followed by disease diagnosis and treatment, physiotherapy, and nutritional products.
Based on the macro and industry data related to the elderly care from 2013 to 2020, according to the "2021-2022 China Pension Industry White Paper", the scale of the pension industry is expected to exceed 12 trillion yuan in 2025.
In the next 5 years, the elderly care industry will also complete the industrial cultivation period ahead of schedule and officially enter the industrial outbreak period. Among them, smart old-age care, age-appropriate transformation, elderly products, elderly culture and other subdivided industries have broad prospects.
Against the backdrop of ageing trends and the rising proportion of young people living alone, the demand for companionship and spiritual comfort has risen, and at the same time fueled the booming pet economy.
According to iResearch's "2021 Pet Consumption Trend White Paper", the scale of China's pet industry has grown from 72.5 billion yuan in 2015 to 298.8 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound growth rate of 32.8% in 6 years, and it is estimated that the scale of the industry will exceed 440 billion yuan by 2023.
Heading for "Made in China"
However, the aging of the population has led to a continuous decline in the proportion of the working population, which is not conducive to the sustained and stable development of the economy, and the economic growth rate may face certain pressure.
Specifically, in terms of expenditure, the elderly are more price-sensitive, their willingness to purchase is not strong, and their willingness to pay for other optional consumption is not strong on average in addition to meeting basic living expenses.
With the deepening of the aging of the population structure, the demographic dividend will gradually disappear, and labor costs will continue to rise. Under this trend, "machine substitution" has also begun to be put on the agenda.
Taking the "world factory" Dongguan as an example, in recent years, transformation and upgrading have become the core proposition of Dongguan. Since 2014, Dongguan has taken the lead in implementing robot intelligent manufacturing application demonstrations with "machine substitution" and high-end equipment and intelligent manufacturing as the starting point.
By June 2016, it was learned from the Dongguan Municipal Government that in order to support enterprises to carry out machine substitution, Dongguan will set up special funds to leverage 10 billion yuan of technological transformation financing, and achieve more than 60% of enterprises to use financial leasing to carry out machine substitution within 3 years.
According to the "China Robot Industry Development Report (2022)", in recent years, the scale of the mainland robot market has continued to grow rapidly, and the application of "robot +" has continued to expand and deepen, and it is expected that in 2022, the scale of China's robot market will reach 17.4 billion US dollars, with an average annual growth rate of 22% in five years.
Due to the aging of the population, the change in labor costs has been promoted, and at the same time, to a certain extent, China's manufacturing industry has made a huge transformation from labor-intensive to technology-intensive.
According to Liding industrial research data, from 2015 to 2019, among all manufacturing projects, the top five compound annual growth rates of industrial added value are computer, communication and other electronic equipment manufacturing, high-tech manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing, and instrumentation manufacturing.
Since 2015, these five industries have maintained a compound annual growth rate of more than 4% or even more than 5% in the process of China's economic slowdown and shift and the compound annual growth rate of manufacturing industrial added value of only 3.3%.
In addition, from 2015 to 2019, the bottom five annual compound growth rate of industrial added value were tobacco products, textiles, clothing and accessories, leather products and footwear, paper and paper products, ferrous metal smelting and rolling processing industries.
It is not difficult to see that the industries with rapid growth in industrial added value are all technology-intensive industries with high added value, while the slow growth rate is low value-added labor-intensive industries.
At present, with the huge changes in the structure of the Chinese and the deepening of the aging population, the further upgrading or transformation of China's manufacturing industry will become inevitable, and China's manufacturing industry is bound to drive to "China's intelligent manufacturing".