Surprises in China

Admittedly, it was my first visit to China. The China International Pet Show in Beijing offered a welcome opportunity for me to travel to East Asia to a country that is steeped in tradition and sometimes also in controversy. The ten-hour flight in the big Airbus, the arrival in Beijing and my first impressions on the journey from the airport to the exhibition ground were all pretty memorable, but they were as nothing compared to my experience of the show itself. China has long since ceased to be regarded purely as the country of product piracy and excessively liberal interpretations of copyright laws. Emphasising his modern lifestyle, the Chinese citizen of today clearly wants to buy products from Europe and is sick of the cheap copies produced by his fellow countrymen. In line with this trend and the resulting demand, there were more exhibitors from Europe than ever before at the CIPS. These were not just big companies that have been globally active for years, but also small firms, some still owner operated, which now rightly see an economic future in the Asian market. A visit to one of the biggest pet store chains in the country convinced me that the pet pro­duct market in China is on the move. Kudi Pets has opened 80 outlets in ten years and aims to continue expanding rapidly. Company founder Ping Xi Wang has looked at plenty of pet stores and picked up ideas on his travels in the USA and western Europe, although he hasn’t really managed to implement any of the concepts successfully in his stores. He told me in a one-to-one discussion that this was because “the clocks somehow still tick at a different rate in China”. The biggest surprise came at the end of the fair, however, on my last circuit of one of the halls. I spoke to a group of young Asians who were wandering around with trolleys from Trixie’s Chinese partner. I only wanted to take a photograph of them, and they had no problem with that. It turned out that my chance encounter was with the management team of a major pet supplies chain in Taiwan. More on this in one of the forthcoming issues of PET worldwide. Philipp GardeminDownload: Surprises in China (PDF file)