ia Wei is chatting away in Mandarin on the phone, negotiating a sale while straightening his cluttered desk. His office is littered with advertisements of graceful, tiled swimming pools; posters of pool equipment frame his head.
“Pools are more and more popular today,” says Wei, owner of Amrex Leisure & Sports Supplies Inc. in Shanghai, which builds pools using the Totally Hayward equipment system. In China’s burgeoning pool industry, Wei is an undisputed success, growing his business since its 2001 launch to build between 50 and 100 pools annually throughout Shanghai and its suburbs. What’s surprising, however, is that half of those projects are residential.
In a nation congested with high-rise condominiums and saturated with public pools, residential development has become a bright spot in the country’s economic forecasts. In fact, at the close of the 2008 Olympics, the primary driving force of growth in the construction industry will be real estate development, experts say. It is also the segment of business with the highest profit margin, about 30 percent, because developers often opt for foreign brands to maximize value.
The problem is that only the wealthy can own pools. A simple rectangular vessel costs as much as $8,000, nearly eight times the per capita income of the nation. “In China, when you put in a pool, they want to have it to look at, not to use it,” Wei says.
As a result, Wei’s success relies on his nation’s ability to develop a middle class. “In China, there’s no such term yet as middle class; China is too large, too uneven. Some places are rich; some are poor,” says Shu-Gang Wang, Ph.D., an associate professor of economics at Beijing’s Peking University. “It’s difficult to define here, but generally it’s people who are white-collar workers, government employees — those who earn a good salary.”
Indeed, the residential pool industry in China is in its infancy. “There is a lot of wealth there, but it’s concentrated in a small population,” says Bill Kent, president of HornerXpress Worldwide in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I don’t think it’s going to modernize in our lifetime, yours or mine. It’s too big, too diverse. There’s too much of everything going on.”
Still, Wang estimates that roughly 30 percent of big-city dwellers fall in this category, and the number is growing so quickly that developers have taken notice.
Peppering the landscape around the clogged highways of Beijing and Shanghai are billboards bearing images of luxurious three-story homes with vast backyards and beckoning pools. The names of these communities read like those found in the U.S. Sunbelt: Rose Villas, Cathay Residences, Vanland Mansions and Olympic Garden Villas.
“China has few pools right now, but this will change,” says Nir Eyal, CEO of Sunshine Business Development, a Jersey City, N.J.-based company that sells high-end pool products to China. “Today, we cap it at 30,000 pools in all of China, but it is a growing market. There is so much development going on there.”
In the end, the future of China’s residential pool industry will lie in the hands of its citizens. “It’s a matter of preference,” Wang says. “Living in a house is different from living in an apartment, so if you’re rich, you have the choice. You can have one house in the city for convenience and one house in the countryside just for a more comfortable life.”
