A woman shows off air purifiers at an exhibition in November in Beijing. Photo: IC
With air quality readings from the US embassy in Beijing frequently rating the capital's air as "very unhealthy," pollution is an issue that has been haunt¬ing Liu Jie, a 58-year-old retired teacher.
Liu lives in the relatively healthy coastal economic zone of Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, but her daughter works in Beijing, which has been hit by periods of thick, chok¬ing smog over the last month.
Liu travelled some 2,300 kilome¬ters to the capital last Sunday, just to send her daughter an American brand air cleaner, which is designed for a room no bigger than 36 square meters and costs 9,300 yuan ($1,465).
The moment she walked out of the airport, there was "a depressing sight. The city was shrouded by a beige pall with a heavy blanket of dust in the sky," Liu told the Global Times, curl¬ing her lip.
"My husband and I have been using an air filter for two years in our bedroom. We wouldn't sleep well without it," she said.
People like Liu Jie are increasingly common in China today amid the "worsening trend of urban air pollu-tion, which can be blamed mainly on emissions," according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
Nearly 40 percent of major Chinese cities suffered air pollution exceeding the country's official limits during the first six months of this year, the ministry announced last week.
Indoor air pollution is up to five times worse than outdoor air pol¬lution due to inhalable particles, formaldehyde, toxic gases, and lack of oxygen, and it can lead to major ill¬nesses, according to a report by China Association for Stan¬dardization. And a World Bank study released in 2007 found that air pol¬lution in China kills up to 400,000 people annually.
The growing clamor over the health risks posed by poor indoor and outdoor air quality has given a boost to the air purification equipment industry. The market is mainly the rising middle class in fast expanding cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, analysts and insiders said.
With approximately 665 million urban residents in China, the domes¬tic market for air purifiers is expected to be worth 80 billion yuan by 2015 with annual growth of 20 percent by then, according to the latest China Industry Research Report by Beijing Kexin Consulting Co.
But the nascent sector currently has a penetration rate of less than 1 percent in China, compared to 42 percent in Europe, 27 percent in the US and 15 percent in Japan, said the report.
Rising demand
In November 2009, Liu spent 8,600 yuan on her family's first air purifier, which she bought in Guang-zhou, capital of Guangdong Province, after friends strongly recommended that she buy it. The device sends out positively charged ions that can ap¬parently purify indoor air in less than 10 minutes.
This equipment is gradually transcending the popular percep¬tion that it's just a luxury. It's now seen as a necessary part of a modern home, according to Liu Buchen, a senior home-appliance analyst with Beijing-based CIC Industry Research Center.
Liu believes the market for air purifiers will maintain fast growth this year thanks to people's increasing spending on home improvements, as well as marketing by the companies.
"Sales in the Beijing-Tianjin- Tangshan Region on the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, which are known as China's most polluted regions, account for roughly 60 percent of the nationwide sales," Liu told the Global Times.
Hunan-based Broad Group re¬vealed that its revenue from air puri¬fier sales tripled year-on-year to more than 600 million yuan from January to October 2011.
Japanese home appliance maker Sharp Corporation will soon unveil two new air purifier models in China, following remarkable sales of 2.49 million units last year.
Demand from residents is "un¬precedentedly high" following public debate over whether the government is obscuring the extent of the na¬tion's air pollution, Huang Wenwu, who runs a Beijing company selling Blueair air purifiers, told the Global Times.
Can you afford it?
More than 200 Broad air purifiers are installed throughout the Great Hall of the People and inside Zhong¬nanhai, the walled compound where China's top leaders live and work, Broad Vice President Zhang Zhong claimed in one of the company's advertisements.
Yuan Zheng, marketing director at Broad group, told the Global Times that large buyers, including State-owned enterprises, hotels and hospitals account for half of their total sales of purifiers.
The short-term target for the company's air purifi¬cation line is still to find more high-end residential customers.
However, not everyone can afford an air puri¬fier. The prices range from around one thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.
"It's not for people like me. I would have to work day and night for three months to get one," complained Zhang Jianxiang, a 46-year-old food stall vendor in Beijing.
"If air purifiers turn into a symbol for the privileged, it's not a good sign for market expansion," said Yuan.
Lack of regulation
However, the situation won't change overnight, believes Mike Murphy, CEO of Swedish air purifier maker IQAir, who also warned of a lack of regulation and standards in the domestic industry.
"Many domestic brands are produced by small- and medium-size firms, which have limited financing, technology, R&D capacity and quality controls," he said.
The cost for these lower-end products is sometimes less than 100 yuan, with a profit margin of more than 800 percent, according to Song Guangsheng, secretary general of the China Indoor Environmental Monitoring Committee under the China National Interior Decoration Association.
A number of the cheaper "purifiers" actually let out excessive ozone, which can trigger breathing problems, as well as asthma and some are merely humidi¬fiers.
