In South Korea, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and where the demographic crisis has been elevated to the status of a “national emergency,” the sale of baby strollers has become big business. It may sound paradoxical, but what matters is who the strollers, which can cost hundreds or even thousands of euros, are designed for. Inside are dogs, not newborns, who are increasingly hard to spot on the streets of South Korea. The industry has changed so much that by 2023, more cars were sold for pets than for children.

This tells us a lot about their demographics.

Change in the world of baby strollers. 2023 was a special year for South Korean stroller sellers. For the first time, they sold more models for cats and dogs than for babies. To be more precise, Gmarket estimates that the former represented 57% of all sales made through its website between January and September. The remaining 43% were made up of children’s units. Not bad when you consider that a few years ago, in 2021, strollers designed for dogs and cats represented 33% of total units sold.

Wall Street Journal He notes that sales of dog strollers have increased fourfold since 2019, with models costing over a thousand dollars. He even mentions a company that started out producing strollers for babies and decided to dedicate its South Korean subsidiary to the dog stroller sector only, due to market fluctuations and a decreasing birth rate in recent years. “You can put your dog or baby in our strollers,” he says: “But the market here needs strollers for pets.”

A specific phenomenon? It doesn’t seem so. First, pet strollers have been gaining market share over baby strollers for several years now. Second, because stroller stores aren’t the only ones noticing the shift in the cycle that has shifted the economy from one focused on babies to one more centered around pets. In June Korea Times He echoed data from Gmarket, which revealed that more pet food is sold than baby food, a trend the platform has been observing since 2021.

What’s more, the pet food market will outstrip the newborn human market by more than ten percentage points.

An example: Seoul figures. The trend and balance of market shares may be striking, but they are still a reflection of a more complex reality: South Korea’s difficult demographics. Seoul provides a telling example. In 2023, the number of dogs registered with the Seoul Metropolitan Government reached 622,000, more than the 594,000 babies born in the city between 2014 and 2023. And no, this is not a phenomenon specific to the capital.

While the country has seen its birth rate fall, moving away from the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman, the number of pets is also increasing at a good pace. The Institute of Rural Economics estimates that 17.4% of the population owned a dog, cat or other pet in 2010. In 2020, that number was already 27.7%, and their estimate is that by 2023, that number will be around 30% of the total population, meaning almost 15 million people nationwide.

A profitable businessMore pets and fewer households shouldering the costs of raising children means better opportunities for the increasingly lucrative pet-sitting business. Korea Times The quotes predict that it will grow over the next few years, reaching 6 trillion won, or 4 billion euros, in 2027. In 2023, it was around 2.7 billion. In 2022, it is estimated that 5.5 million households will have pets, equivalent to about 12 million people.

What about the birth rate? At the opposite pole. World Bank data shows that South Korea’s crude birth rate has been declining for years, with five live births per thousand people in 2022. A decade ago, it was ten births. In the early 1990s, it was close to 20, and in the 1960s, it was over 40 births per thousand.

Another equally dire indicator is the fertility rate, which estimates the number of births a woman can expect to have in her lifetime. South Korea has been below 2.1 for decades, but in recent years the indicator has moved closer to the bottom of the horizontal axis. In 2022, the rate was 0.8.

Last year it was already at a historic low of 0.72. These figures are accompanied by growing fears about how the rising birth rate will affect the country’s economy and defence, especially since the policies adopted by the Government to date have failed to stimulate births.

“I’d rather spend it on my dog.”Kang Seung-min, a young woman who was walking with a poodle stroller in a park in Seoul recently, explained the situation with these words. Wall Street Journal How she sees her future: At 24, she does not plan to get married or become a mother. “I would rather spend money on my dog.” The American newspaper assures that the presence of pet carts on the streets, where the demographic crisis is in the background, is fully discussed in public in South Korea.

At the beginning of the year, a national radio station even dedicated a segment to the “heated debate,” and in 2023, current Labor Minister Kim Moon-soo also expressed his concern: “What worries me is that young people don’t do it. Yes. On the other hand, they love their dogs and take them with them. They don’t get married and they don’t have children. The panorama shows no signs of changing. A recent study showed that one in two South Korean women between the ages of 20 and 49 does not plan to have children.

Images | Angela N. (Flickr)

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