China’s pet population will be close to double that of its young children by 2030 as young Chinese remain unwilling to start new families, Goldman Sachs said in a recent note.

The country’s urban pet population is set to hit over 70 million by the end of the decade, while the number of children four and under will dwindle to less than 40 million, according to Goldman Sachs research that cited data from the National Bureau of Statistics. 

In 2017, the situation was just the opposite — there were 90 million children aged four and under, compared to the urban pet population of around 40 million.

“We expect to see stronger momentum in pet ownership amid a relatively weaker birth rate outlook and higher incremental household pet penetration from the younger generation,” the investment bank’s equity analyst Valerie Zhou wrote. 

New births in the country are projected to fall at an average rate of 4.2% until 2030, largely driven by a decline in the population of women aged 20 to 35 years, and as the younger generation is less inclined to have children, the report stated.

Those aged between 23 and 33 years made up almost half of the pet owners in China as of 2023, according to a China Pet Industry White Paper.

As young Chinese adults opt for fur babies over real babies, the bank expects the country’s pet food market to flourish to a 12 billion industry by 2030. The report also forecasts China’s cat ownership to surpass that of dogs as the former tend to require less space to raise.

Across the globe, birth rates are falling as women choose to have fewer children, with the world population on course to peak this century with some of the world’s largest countries facing declining birth rates.

China’s population fell for a second straight year in 2023 to 1.41 billion people, dropping by 2.08 million from the previous year, government statistics showed. While new marriages in China rose12.4% in 2023 from the previous year, more than half of the population between the ages of 25 and 29 remains unmarried, with late marriages becoming more common in recent years.

In Japan, the pet population of about 20 million is almost four times the size of children aged four and under as of 2022, the report also showed, citing data from Japan Pet Food Association and Euromonitor.