Just a few months after opening his first pet clinic in Hangzhou in early 2019, Yang Zhong, the founder of Joy Pet Hospital, launched two more branches.
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Despite the lingering impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and a property market downturn on many industries, China’s pet economy is thriving, fuelling Yang’s ambitions for rapid expansion.
By 2021, he had opened his first teaching hospital and five new pet hospitals in two other cities – Shanghai and Ningbo.
He now runs over 30 hospitals – with a total of about 400 staff members – that have treated over 100,000 pet dogs and cats.
Yang is riding the boom of the growing pet economy in China, where dogs and cats have become increasingly popular companions for the country’s growing ranks of elderly people and single young adults amid falling marriage and birth rates.
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Based on the latest quarterly data, around 6 million marriages are expected to be registered in China this year – the lowest number since 1980. Meanwhile, the country’s fertility rate – the average number of children born to each woman – is among the lowest in the world and is now estimated to be below one. A rate of 2.1 children per woman is widely accepted as the rate needed for a country’s population to remain constant.