Healthcare firms in the country are looking at the huge potential market as 243 million people in China will reach 60 years or older by 2020, increasing the requirement for specialist healthcare services, China Daily reported.
According to the report, a staggering 212 million or 15.5 percent of the population were aged 60 years or above as of January this year. Some foreign investors such as United Kingdom companies engaged in the business of elderly care services see it as an opportunity, the report said.
In an expo entitled Healthcare is GREAT－Elderly Care Showcase held in late November in Shanghai, delegates representing 20 U.K. companies have sought trade partnerships with Chinese investors, care deliverers and local governments.
Annie Barr International (ABI), an accredited provider of high-quality healthcare training and consultancy services in the U.K, and one of the participants, announced that it will open its training center in Shanghai in 2016 to train carers, nurses, doctors and healthcare support staff for China's elderly care sector.
Annie Barr, founder and director of ABI, said that she saw opportunities to help improve the elderly healthcare sector in China since she first visited the country in 2014.
"It was clear to me that although the (aging) residents seemed happy and were cared for, the environment, standards and the level of care were far from the ideal I was accustomed to," Barr said.
Apart from healthcare services, business opportunities in planning and delivering retirement living and care services also exist, Seif Usher, assistant director for Healthcare, Life Sciences and Social Care for Eastern China, U.K. Trade and Investment, pointed out.
Besides the U.K., companies and organizations from the Netherlands also see opportunities in China for healthcare services for senior citizens.
A delegation of 25 Dutch companies led by Martin van Rijin, state secretary for health, welfare and sports of the Netherlands, signed in late October cooperation agreements with a number of Chinese companies during a forum held in Shanghai. The report said the agreements cover a wide range of areas like equipment, process management and healthcare.
A Web-based app called RAIview, which was developed by the Netherlands Institute for Healthcare and Wellbeing, can assess the health and wellbeing of an individual and has debuted in the Chinese market.
The report said that the app can monitor the elderly, enabling service providers to minimize risks in terms of their ability to provide timely critical services.
Five state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and property developers have reportedly started using RAIview, which mainly targets wealthy senior citizens.
Some SOEs also reportedly plan to convert some of their properties into profitable elderly care institutions, while some real estate developers will renovate some of their projects into elderly care and medicare communities.
According to van Rijin, the size of the global elderly care market was just 200 million euros in 1998, but now it has ballooned to 30 billion euros. He added that the number will likely grow as China's elderly population increases by 9.8 million every year, and by 2020, China will be home to 243 million citizens aged 60 years or older.
The report said that the number will exceed 300 million by 2025, due to rapid growth rate over the last decade. In 2005, the elderly account for 13 percent of the total population, but since 2011, their numbers grew by an annual rate of 5 percent.
According to the United Nations, a country or region is in aging stage once people aged 60 years or above are more than 10 percent of the population.
The market for elderly care in China is also expanding rapidly. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said that from around 4 trillion yuan ($617 billion) in sales at present, this revenue is estimated to grow to 13 trillion yuan in 2030 and 106 trillion yuan, or 33 percent of the country's GDP, by 2050.