It appears that, in China, various kinds of dairy products fill every corner of the supermarket and shopping malls overnight. In the past decade, Chinese dairy industry has been growing at an alarming rate.

Relevant statistics show that during the past decade, Chinese dairy products have surge ninefold. The liquid milk products have increased even ten times or more. Last year, Chinese dairy products output was the fourth largest in the world. Chinese dairy industry has expanded very rapidly during the past ten years.

In spite of this, industrial analysts are still optimistic about the prospect of Chinese dairy industry, saying that the market will continue to grow in the future. They say that in Western countries, a person consumes 300 kilograms of milk every year on average. Even in India, the per capita milk consumption is 80 kilograms every year. The per capita milk consumption in China, however, is less than 22 kilograms now, or one-fifth of the world's average. For a country with a large population, China has a huge market for dairy consumption.

There are some people who are skeptical about this optimistic view. They say that in recent years, the demand and supply relationship has changed greatly in China. In large and medium-size cities, the market has become full. In Beijing and some other cities, price wars occur frequently. In some places where competition is fierce, the price of milk is even lower than that of water. With such price wars, the profit for the dairy industry has turned smaller. For some dairy product manufacturers, the profit rate is less than 6%. This might hinder their development in the future.

Many Chinese local enterprises have done a lot of work in order to boost the market. To encourage more people to develop the habit of drinking milk, some companies urge people to drink one kilogram of milk per day. Some even focus their attention on the 200 million primary and secondary school children in China. There are frequent reports about companies donating milk to children.

"If every child consumes a half kilogram of milk every day, then 200 million primary and secondary school children in China will drink 40 million tons of milk every year. If every Chinese can drink a half kilogram of milk every day, they would consume more than one-third of the world's total milk output," said a market analyst.
 
Editor: Yan