China’s Pet Boom Becomes a Luxury Frontier

A two-thousand-franc dog bowl is hardly mainstream. It distills something larger: a market worth more than 300 billion yuan (38.74 billion euros), shared by over 126 million cats and dogs, watched closely by major houses including Gucci, Hermès and Louis Vuitton. What follows is an account of how love gets priced, and of how a shrinking, aging China is handing the luxury industry its next growth frontier.

Consider first at China’s population curves. The birth rate has more than halved in a decade, falling to 5.63 per 1,000 in 2025, with annual births dropping to 7.92 million, the lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic. The fertility rate has fallen to around 1.0, roughly half the replacement level of 2.1, placing China among the lowest-fertility societies in the world. Marriage, still closely tied to childbirth here, is contracting even faster: 6.1 million couples wed in 2024, a drop of more than 20% and a record low.

The pet and toddler curves crossed in 2024. Drawing on National Bureau of Statistics data, Goldman Sachs found that China’s pet population surpassed the number of children under four for the first time that year. By 2030 pets are projected to outnumber toddlers by roughly two to one, with more than 70 million urban pets against fewer than 40 million young children, a reversal of the 2017 picture of 90 million children and 40 million pets.

The drivers are shared. Later marriage, an aging population with more than 310 million people over 60, and falling fertility have created a vast unmet demand for companionship, and pets fill a role once reserved for children. This is recent. Within living memory, pet dogs were treated as a bourgeois indulgence and discouraged, kept in the countryside to guard rather than for companionship. The move from function to family has happened in a single generation, and the new owners are young, urban and often single: people born after 1990 make up around two-thirds of them. The emotional data is unambiguous. In JD.com’s 2025 Pet Industry Consumption Trends Report, 85.5% of owners cite emotional support as their main reason for keeping a pet, 58% regard the animal as a family member and another 29% as a close friend, and close to 60% factor their pets into long-term life plans.