During the next 15 years, 400 million Chinese will move from rural areas to cities. This creates a huge market for prefabricated, sustainable building units. The Danish-Chinese export cluster is well underway with rethinking business models, product development and marketing.
By Jesper Andersen
Collaboration is the key to the Chinese market
T
he Chinese middle class
is experiencing explosive growth, and as prosperity increases, people are moving in droves from the rural areas to China’s cities. In 2012, around 9 million homes will be built in China, but within just three years, that figure is expected to be nearly 35 million. By 2020, half of all new homes in the world will be built in China. In just a few years, private homes in China will be responsible for more than half of the country’s energy consumption, which is why China has a clear interest in increasing the use of sustainable, prefabricated modular
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Copenhagen Cleantech Journal
building units. This is an area where Denmark holds a strong hand. The trick is to play your cards right, because the Chinese market differs radically from western markets. “In China, we can forget all about traditional marketing. The Chinese market is all about relations – to the right partners, to the authorities, to the state and to the universities. To the Chinese, good, trusting relations are worth more than a contract. But since building relations takes a long time, only the largest Danish companies have had the resources to establish a presence in China on their own. But 80 per cent of the Danish business community are small and medium-