China Minsheng Investment Group (CMIG) is bucking the trend of building senior living projects as the country’s popula-tion ages, and is instead looking to manage more residential proper-ties to seek a bigger slice of the elderly care market.
The mainland’s largest non-state investment conglomerate said it would introduce new tech-nologies, raise fresh funds and ex-pand its service network to build a chain of senior care businesses in a market expected to top 13 tril-lion yuan (HK$15.35 trillion).
Wang Hui, a vice-president of CMIG and chairman of its subsid-iary CMIG Futurelife, a residential community service provider, said the company aimed to manage 1.8 billion square metres of resi-dential properties across the country in the next few years, more than double its current 700 million sq metres.
“Having a vast number of property projects under our man-agement will lay a solid founda-tion for us to better develop senior care services in communities,” she told the South China Morning Post. “Financial, insurance and health care services will be meld-ed into our business platform.”
The mainland’s population of retirees aged above 65 is esti-mated to hit 330 million by 2050 from 110 million in 2010, a rate of ageing much faster than many de-veloped economies, according to the World Health Organisation.
The market for elderly care in China is now worth about four trillion yuan, according to Wang.
CMIG Futurelife, founded in 2014, manages residential prop-erties in 155 cities in China. About 20 million people are living at communities under its manage-ment and it will eventually serve 60 million residents after the planned expansion.
Wang said her company would build facilities at each com-munity offering financial, enter-tainment, catering, medical and nursing services.
“In the long term, we want to make better use of business data generated from our property management businesses so as to help the company extend its reach to every household that needs se-nior care services,” she said.
“An ecosystem will be created for senior residents, insurers, nursing services and other organ-isations, and it will benefit all of them.”
Developers, including China Vanke, Greentown, Evergrande and Sino Ocean Land, are increas-ing investment in senior living projects to boost the number of nursing homes, hoping to profit from the growing market.
But analysts said the need for senior care beds may have been overestimated.
There were about 4.7 care beds for every 100 people above 65 at the end of 2015, compared with five in Japan and 5.9 in the US, ac-cording to DBS.