There are 3.94 million babies born in 2017, more than that in the whole U.S. 60% of babies younger than 3 years are living in lower-tier cities and 49% of maternal and baby product sales are from lower-tier cities. This is a huge potential market for maternal and baby products.

In China, lower-tier cities refer to big non-provincial capital cities, county-level cities and counties. This is a huge potential market for maternal and baby products. Kantar Worldpanel China’s National Maternal and Baby Panel cover tier-1 to 5 cities across 20 provinces. From the lower-tier cities within the baby panel, there are 3.94 million babies born in 2017, more than that in the whole United States.

Within the baby panel, 60% of babies younger than 3 years are living in lower-tier cities and 49% of maternal and baby product sales are from lower-tier cities.

Per consumer spending in lower-tier cities on baby products is only two-thirds of that of upper-tier cities, but there is huge room for growth. The total sales growth for the whole FMCG market, for example, the compound annualized growth for upper-tier cities was 4.4% from 2012 to 2017 while it was 6.1% for lower-tier cities.

For leading brands in maternal and baby categories, there are lots of white spaces to be occupied. In infant milk formula, baby diaper, and baby toiletry categories, for example, leading brands still don’t command as big shares as they have achieved in upper-tier cities.

Parents in upper- and lower-tier cities have different income standards and living environment, but their willingness to invest for their kids are almost identical.

In addition to the necessary products, such as infant milk formula, baby diaper, and baby food, lower-tier city parents are as ready to buy into more sophisticated categories as their counterparts in bigger cities, such as wipes, baby dental care products, breast pump, and baby tableware utensils.

Lower-tier city parents aren’t automatically low-end brand buyers either. According to Kantar Worldpanel data, their buying price is almost the same as parents from upper-tier cities, especially in infant milk formula and baby food categories.

In the infant milk formula category, they prefer domestic high-end brands, such as the premium brand Feifan under Chinese company Feihe. The unit price for its stage one formula is 526 yuan per kilogram (price on JD.com), much higher than similar products from Wyeth (398 yuan per kilogram) and Abbott (466 yuan per kilogram).

Mothers from lower-tier cities are frequent e-commerce or even social-commerce buyers. Among the lower-tier city mothers within Kantar Worldpanel’s monitoring network, 59% of them have bought baby products online while 18% have bought through WeChat.

In baby diaper and infant milk formula categories, the penetration of WeChat shopper is higher in lower-tier cities as compared to upper-tier cities.

Chinese brands are already taking advantage of this emerging new channel. Shenzhen-based Care Daily company has achieved 62% of its lower-tier city sales from WeChat, according to Kantar Worldpanel data.

1. The pre-born stage is crucial to influence brand choice

In lower-tier cities, 71% of mothers start to learn about baby products no later than six months into the pregnancy.

2. Physical function and value for money are still critical

Among all reasons for choosing a diaper product, lower-tier mothers care more about soft material (lower-tier 37% vs upper-tier 35%), good absorption (32% vs 24%) and reasonable price (17% vs 14%).

When choosing infant milk formula, lower-tier mothers would rely more on family recommendation (32% vs 30%), special ingredient (24% vs 22%). They don’t care so much about the source of milk. (32% vs 36%).

3. They prefer the professional brand image

This is closely related to their relatively limited information sources on this subject. Compared with upper-tier mothers, those living in the lower-tier city would rely more on childcare expert and doctors to learn information and build up knowledge.

4. Expand brand presence in baby stores

Baby stores are more important in contributing to sales in lower-tier cities – in the west region, it even accounted for 43% of all sales. The concentration level is still lower: the top 10 store chains accounted for 24% of all baby store sales while the highest is only 30% in the west region.

5. Omnichannel opportunities

Omnichannel shopping, the convergence of online and offline shopping, is the major trend in China. maternal and baby product, which is an “early adopter” of e-commerce, has witnessed many successful omnichannel shopping cases.

Aptamil has worked with omnichannel maternal and baby product retailer Kidswant to capture targeted audience profile and leveraged the insights to optimize its media spending on Tencent. Mead Johnson has partnered with JD.com to leverage the latter’s nationwide logistics network to help distribute its products to baby stores in lower-tier cities.

This post was originally published on Kantar.com.

Within the online retail B2C market, maternal and child sector saw a high growth of 54.3% in GMV to 63.48 billion yuan in Q1 2018.

Tmall led this market with a lion’s share of 49.2%, followed by JD.com (19.2%) and Redbaby (8.0%).

Get an overview of China B2C online retail market for Q1 2018 here.

The number of China’s newborn babies keeps a steady growth in recent years and is estimated to reach 18.08 million by 2018 according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

In 2012, China’s mother & baby care market had a transaction value of RMB 1.402 billion (USD 210 million) with a growth rate of 17.3%; and, it is estimated to reach 3.107 billion yuan (USD 465 million) by 2018 according to Analysys.

Babytree ranks the first place among top 10 mother & baby applications in China by the number of active users, followed by Beibei and Baobaozhidao.

China’s mother & baby communities’ user penetration rate has been increasing as of Q2 2015, which was 1.72%, and reached 2.87% in Q1 2016.

80.7% female users make up China’s mobile mother & baby care market.

Near 60% of mobile mother & baby care market was made up of 25 to 30 years old users.

The growth rate of China’s mother & baby care online retail value reached the peak with 81.1% in 2014; meanwhile, the transaction value was 156.8 billion yuan (USD 23.49 billion); and, it is estimated to reach 494.6 billion yuan (USD 74.10 billion) by 2018 with a growth rate of 26.1%.

The big demand for mother & baby care products drives China to be the second largest country of mother & baby care market, next to the United States.

Chinese moms are very active on social media and many of them like sharing information of their children with others. 48% mothers follow mother-care products’ WeChat subscription accounts and 47% follow WeChat official accounts on parenting and education.

Safety and quality are top concern when mothers shop online. 84.5% of mothers consider safety as a priority when buying children products and 66% are willing to buy high quality goods even if they are a little expensive.

The top three online shopping websites by mothers are Taobao, Tmall and Jingdong. 82.6% of shopping mothers enter the websites by entering the URLs and only 8.2% enter via ads. About 44.3% mothers cannot memorize website URLs or may prefer searching the shopping website names online.

On average, a mother spends on online shopping for about 17 minutes and visits an average of 9.8 pages during shopping and nearly 80% would add products to shopping carts.

Chinese moms also like to interact with mother-care brands. About 82.4% want to download related apps and expect brands or experts answer their questions on babysitting on social media.

Also read: China Mobile Shopping in Counties Over $32.16B in 2014

Transaction value of China’s mothercare products on the online shopping platforms reached 190.24 billion yuan (US$29.67 billion) in the first half of 2015, including products such as infant formula, supplementary foods, diapers, baby supplies, baby clothing, toys, pregnant women supplies and so on.

Apart from deals on the official websites, all the transactions of mothercare products were completed on B2C and C2C platforms. C2C (consumer to consumer) platforms accounted for 69.7% of sales pursuant to overseas purchasing of various categories of mothercare products; Taobao and Baidu led the C2C market in China.

Tmall and Suning are the top two B2C platform for mothercare products, accounting for 60.9% and 14% respectively.

In China, over 16 million infants were born every year and the number of infants aged 0 to 3 years was more than 70 million. Large demand for mothercare products drvies China to be the second largest country of mothercare products market, only next to the United States.

The post-80s, who were familiar with online shopping and became accustomed to purchase related products online, promoted the maturity and development of the industry. Male shoppers of infant formula reached over 55.8% in 2014 and the ration was to keep increasing this year.

Also read: China E-commerce Market to Reach US$3.8 Trillion in 2018

Chinese mothers spend one-third of their online time on shopping in 2015 according to CTR Market Research. In comparison, Chinese moms’ time on social media is only one third as much as on Online.

About 85.7% mothers in China buy baby’s products online. The majority of them received high education with high income so that they could get relatively high quality goods by shopping online, especially shopping overseas goods. About 91.3% mothers buy baby’s products offline.

Expenditure mothers spend offline shopping (55.7%) is not much more than online (44.3%). In China, over 16 million infants are born every year and the number of infants aged 0 to 3 years is more than 70 million. Chinese mothercare products market has a huge potential and bright future considering the Chinese government has just allowed two children for each family.

63.1% Chinese internet users will shop online this year, which is more than 400 million people estimated by eMarketer. By 2020, the number of Chinese internet users is expected to reach 80% of the total population, and 70% of them would shop online.

Transaction value of China’s mothercare products on the online shopping platforms reached 190.24 billion yuan (US$29.67 billion) in the first half of 2015, and more male shoppers bought mothercare products than female since 2014.

Also read: China Mobile Shopping Turnover Surpassed PC in Q2 2015

On August 6th, the Chinese largest shopping website taobao.com’s unit g.taobao.com published a report on its website, revealing the history of Chinese online shopping and preference of Chinese online shoppers through analyzing big data.

According to the Report, online shoppers in China have expanded their foothold to more than 100 countries and regions in the past decade while, in the meantime, the total number of online items has exceeded two million.

In the early years of online shopping overseas, Chinese buyers preferred shopping websites in Hong Kong and Macau. And now they have switched their attention to a wider range of areas, including Japan, South Korea, North America, Europe as well as South Africa.

To find out the shoppers favorite shopping areas, Taobao ranked these countries by the total number of transactions. The result shows that among all the regions, Japan, the United States and South Korea are the favorites, followed by Hong Kong, Germany, France, Taiwan, Australia, U.K. and Denmark.

Cross-border online shopping experienced a rapid growth in the year 2015, with new buyers taking up 28% of the overall buyers, which is much higher than the previous years.

The report also shows different preferences among new and experienced buyers. Newcomers prefer cosmetics while experienced shoppers are more of foodies. Among all the buyers, mothers are the most active ones, with baby formulas and baby products accounting for nearly half of the top 10 spots of the hottest items bought overseas online.

Another characteristic of these online shoppers is that they follow popular trends. For instance, the Russia-made cellphone Yota sold well after visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin gave it as a present to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during the APEC meeting in Beijing in 2014.

The report also discovered regional differences among buyers.The data showed that shoppers from Shanghai and Beijing are the most active ones with total number of transactions accounting for 12% and 11% respectively; this followed by Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, Wuhan, Tianjin and Suzhou.

Interestingly, their preferences vary significantly. For example, those from Beijing prefer air purifiers primarily due to the severe pollution, while people in Shenzhen like to buy cookies.

Read more: China Online Shopping Accounted for over 10% of Total Retail in Q1 2015

China mother and baby products market reached 1.43 trillion yuan ($230 billion) and expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan ($320 billion) in 2015, 6.8% of total consumer retail market in China.

China mother and baby products online market is expected to reach 295.92 billion yuan ($47.38 billion) in 2018, compared to 86.03 billion yuan ($13.77 billion; 6% penetration rate) in 2013 according to iResearch.

Online mother and baby product buyers between 25 and 35 years old represent 50% of total. 51.5% are female.

Tmall represented 55.5% market share by transaction value, ranking top in China mother care market in Q3 2014, followed by Jingdong and Dangdang. Japanese brand Merris was the best seller in Tmall‘s baby care category with a total sales value of RMB32.97 million ($5.37 million) in September 2014.

Read more: Understanding New Generation of Chinese Moms

There are 20 million new babies in China every year. The total value of parenting market in China exceeds RMB500 billion involving over 10 industries. With the increase of family income and stronger consumption awareness for mom and her baby, the market can be seeing strong growth in China.

Among all new generation of Chinese moms, post-80s accounted for 85.1% which are the major group in China. Besides, post-90s are now becoming new moms; their consumption habits and can bring changes to China baby apparel market.

Among the Chinese moms with expectation for babies gender, post-90s favor girls more than boys in China. That’s against Chinese tradition that a boy is often preferred

Housing price in China can influence post-90s and they tend to have baby at an older age.

61.6% of new generation young Chinese pregnant mother have positive attitudes to having new babies. The younger Chinese moms are, and more anxious they tend to be.

Chinese moms who worry about the lack of knowledge and experience accounted for 60.9% in China, which is their primary concern, followed by the worry of whether someone can give a hand with babycare.

Chinese moms tend to trust mom & baby’s magazine, expert & doctor and parenting website & online community with more powerful and useful knowledge.

Also read: China Mother Care B2C Market Exceeded $3 Bln in Q3 2014

In Q3 2014, total transaction value of China mother care market exceeded RMB23.48 billion ($3.82 billion) with an increase of 129% from the same period in 2013.

Tmall represented 55.5% market share by transaction value, ranking top in China mother care market in Q3 2014, followed by Jingdong and Dangdang. Japanese brand Merris was the best seller in Tmall‘s baby care category with a total sales value of RMB32.97 million ($5.37 million) in September 2014.

China’s professional mother care products sprang up from recent two years and its great power generated from post-80s consumers in China, who have high salary and mature online shopping habit. As post-80s and post-90s consumers are reaching marriage and childbearing age, their demand for mother care products will increase which further drive China mother care market’s rapid growth.

At present, China mother care B2C e-commerce market is still at early stage where consumers are cultivating their shopping habits. Different B2C e-commerce companies are exploring business models, such as products with special offers, O2O model and mothers’ online community. On desktop, online community’s UVs exceeded 360 million with an increase of 15.5% YoY in August 2014. Online Community will be more powerful in China social media for Chinese moms.

Also read: INFOGRAPHIC: China’s Top 30 B2C Websites

There are 20 million new babies in China every year. The total value of parenting market in China exceeds RMB500 billion involving over 10 industries. With the increase of family income and stronger consumption awareness for mom and her baby, the market can be booming continuously in China.

Major typical Chinese family consists of baby, parents and grandparents. 92.5% of moms in Chinese families have absolute control over consumption for their babies’. Over 74% of Chinese moms will make ends meet and be reasonable about consumption.

Chinese moms are more concern about health care products, nowadays, many moms are becoming the fans of cross-border shopping online.

The common products in mom’s and baby’s market include fast moving consumer goods and durable consumer goods. Here is a list for these two kinds of products in China.

Babies’ consumption in first tier cities is the least which indicates families in first tier cities are less stressed than ones in other cities.

In most Chinese families, 39.3% of moms are planning to buy a car or change the old one, and 28% of moms want to buy a house or living in a bigger one. 65% of Chinese families’ decision making power is controlled by moms.

74.5% of Chinese parents would like to spend their savings and salary on babies’ consumption.

84.6% of Chinese moms will recommend good products they used to friends and families. Such kind of behavior will be a good marketing strategy for mom and baby’s products, so good user experience can be really important.

Also read: China’s Post-90s More Confidence and More Willing to Spend