3M bearish on China's air, water purification market

Updated: 2015-03-27 11:38

By Wang Ying in Shanghai(China Daily USA)

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3M bearish on China's air, water purification market

Although some products can be purchased for under $10 online, awareness of this market remains low in China. Provided to China Daily

As more Chinese consumers are prepared to pay for purified water and clean air, a huge market beckons.

Less than 5 percent of Chinese families use water-purification facilities at home, compared to 70 percent in developed countries in Asia and 90 percent of European and American homes, said E Xueli, a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Health and Related Product Safety.

The institute operates under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Other surveys show that 40 percent of the Chinese population is not even aware such equipment exists, even though such products can be bought online from as little as 55 yuan ($9). Top-end products ramp up to 50,000 yuan.

But domestic sales have been growing at a rate of about 60 percent annually, while sales of air-filtration equipment have doubled for the last three years, said Luo Zhiming, general manager of 3M China Ltd's purification, industrial and transportation business division.

Sales of air-purification equipment in China reached 14.5 billion yuan last year and the market should grow at an annual rate of 48 percent until 2020, according to an industrial white paper published by China Market Monitor Co Ltd.

Over 62 percent of polled consumers said they want to buy water-purification systems for their homes, prompting Chen Gang, deputy secretary-general of China Household Electrical Appliances Association, to predict that the market will pass 400 billion yuan within five years.

Consumers can also buy a do-it-yourself air-purification net for 70 yuan or get a professional system for 200,000 yuan on Taobao.com, the nation's largest e-commerce platform.

But 82 percent of users in China are skeptical about the efficacy of these systems because there is no easy way to gauge how clean the "filtered" air actually is.

"3M is aware of such market conditions and the company is striving to reach a breakthrough by adding transducer technology into its purification products," said Luo.

As calls are growing louder for better-quality purifiers, 3M is investing generously and drawing on its 75 years of experience in the water-purification industry to help revise national standards, he added. The US-based company has been working on air-filtering products for four decades.

The company allocates 5 percent of its $30-billion annual revenue to research and development.

When it entered China's water-purification market in 2006, the first thing 3M did was carry out extensive research into the quality of the water in different parts of the country. It then launched products based on the results of that research, the company said.

About 27 percent of US families own air purifiers. The corresponding rates in Asia are 17 percent for Japan and under 0.1 percent in China, according to Xinhuanet.com.

wang_ying@chinadaily.com.cn

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