The global market size exceeds 100 billion, the number of enterprises has skyrocketed fourfold. The path for pet product brands to go global | Global
Currently, pet consumption has moved beyond the "short-term pandemic stimulus" and shifted towards a long-term growth paradigm driven by demographic changes, the upgrading of emotional needs, and technological empowerment. The overall growth of the "pet economy" has been remarkable, with the global market size exceeding $150 billion. Among them, the pet supplies category is becoming the second-largest growth track after pet food. Euromonitor data shows that from 2015 to 2021, the global pet supplies market size increased to $44.36 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.7%.
The rapidly growing market is attracting more Chinese enterprises to enter. Qichacha data shows that as of the end of April 2025, the number of domestic enterprises related to the pet economy reached 4.474 million, more than three times the number in 2021. Among them, more than 77% of the enterprises were established less than three years ago. According to the overseas pet consumption trends released by Taobao's overseas expansion, during this year's overseas 618 promotion, more than 30,000 pet merchants participated in Tmall's 618 overseas expansion. Among them, the cross-border turnover of more than 1,000 merchants doubled year-on-year.
The sudden increase in players has greatly enriched the overseas supply and is reshaping the market competition landscape. On the one hand, it has driven down the overall market price, especially in the European and American markets dominated by high-unit-price products. On the other hand, with the improvement of technology and manufacturing levels, pet supplies are also evolving towards intelligence.
Facing such an overseas market environment, different types of pet supplies enterprises have different feelings.
New brands emerging under the new consumption trend in the past few years have quickly opened up the Southeast Asian market through their expertise in e-commerce channel operation and social media marketing. However, they are facing double challenges in the mature European and American markets: the brand barriers of local industry giants and the price competition triggered by new domestic players.
More enterprises that have just entered the pet track across industries are quickly seizing overseas market share with more cost-effective products. At the same time, they are also actively learning from leading brands, accumulating an understanding of the market, and trying to make the leap towards brand building.
Facing an unshaped market landscape, the consensus among overseas enterprises is that building brand awareness by accumulating user word-of-mouth through products is the only way to stay in the game in the long run.
01 Supply chain enterprises transitioning from 2B to 2C, and new consumer brands expanding from Southeast Asia to Europe and America
Pet supplies mainly include sub-categories such as leashes, cleaning and care products, pet beds and mats, feeding utensils, pet clothing, and pet toys. The overseas expansion paths of pet supplies enterprises can be roughly divided into two categories according to their capabilities and advantages:
One type is supply chain enterprises with production capabilities but a lack of understanding of the overseas market and brand-building capabilities. These enterprises often start with "manufacturing going global" and provide products for large retail platforms such as Walmart and Amazon, as well as large pet supplies chain supermarkets such as Chewy, Petsmart, and Petco through OEM/ODM贴牌代工 methods.
Tianyuan Pet is a typical representative of such enterprises. In 2000, Tianyuan Pet began to participate in various international exhibitions to develop international customers. While promoting ODM/OEM business, it also cultivated its own brand. Since 2014, Tianyuan Pet has successively acquired pet brands in the United States and Germany and established "Japan Pet Alliance Co., Ltd." in Japan to be responsible for business in the Japanese and Korean markets. At the same time, Tianyuan Pet has also laid out cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and built an independent website as a display channel for its products and brand.
In November 2022, Tianyuan Pet was listed on the ChiNext of the A-share market, becoming the sixth pet enterprise listed on the A-share market in China. The financial report shows that in 2024, Tianyuan Pet's overseas revenue was 1.332 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18.4%, accounting for 48.2% of the total revenue. Currently, Tianyuan Pet is further increasing its overseas investment, setting up production bases in Vietnam and Cambodia and establishing a holding subsidiary in the United States to carry out overseas warehouse business.
To give full play to their supply chain advantages, these enterprises often choose the North American region with the largest market size as their first choice and quickly increase their market share with cost-effective products. Southeast Asia is mainly used as a production base. However, in the shadow of tariff conflicts in the past two years, some enterprises have been forced to shift their market focus to Japan or Europe.
The other type of overseas pet supplies enterprises are mainly new consumer brands emerging with the rise of new consumption, such as Petkit, Catlink, Hommi, Birdtalker, Petwant, PAPIFEED, etc.
Different from supply chain enterprises, new consumer brands start their overseas expansion from neighboring Southeast Asian countries. Amy, the person in charge of a leading domestic pet supplies brand, said, "Although the market size in Southeast Asia is not as large as that in Europe and America, it is also a blue ocean market with high growth. And there are not many leading enterprises monopolizing the market. Therefore, Chinese brands can gain a first-mover advantage with stronger brand capabilities and quickly reach the forefront of the market."
For example, both Petkit and Catlink adopt a light-asset model of cooperating with local agents. The brand provides a stable supply chain and customer service training, and the agents are responsible for local market development and sales. They quickly expand the market through online channels such as Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok.
These new consumer brands also replicate their marketing capabilities overseas and cooperate with local KOLs on social media to expand their brand influence. In 2021, Petkit also launched the intelligent cat litter box PURA MAX on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. While promoting the product, it raised more than one million dollars.
02 Price competition driving intelligent upgrading: a false demand or a real trend?
"Competition in ordinary pet supplies has been very fierce for several years, and the profit margin has been compressed to a very low level," said Zhang Jian, the operation director of Aisen Intelligence. The company started to adopt the strategy of "using technology to avoid price competition" more than two years ago and shifted its R & D focus to "AI +" intelligent pet supplies, hoping to create product differentiation and increase brand awareness and profit margins.
Intelligent pet supplies generally refer to various pet supplies transformed or innovated using intelligent hardware technologies such as Wifi, 5G, AI, and the Internet of Things, including intelligent cat litter boxes, intelligent feeders, intelligent water dispensers, intelligent cameras, intelligent leashes, etc. According to QY Research statistics, as of 2023, the global sales of intelligent pet supplies reached $4.2 billion. The United States is the largest pet market in the world, and more than half of American adults have purchased intelligent devices for their pets.
In 2023, Catlink launched five intelligent products and their supporting supplies on the Amazon US station and became the number one in the cat litter box category during the Black Friday period. In 2024, the intelligent bird feeder of the niche brand Birdfy, among the feeders generally priced at $9.9 - $19.9 on Amazon, rushed to the Amazon bestseller list at a high price of $199, with monthly sales of millions of dollars.
However, when enterprises rushed into the intelligent pet supplies track in 2025, they found it was not so easy to make money.
Since the second half of 2024, a large number of factory贴牌competitors of the same type as the products of leading brands have appeared on Amazon, triggering price competition with lower mold-opening costs. A relevant person in charge of Catlink once publicly shared that as of October 2024, the number of ASINs of intelligent cat litter boxes on Amazon increased by 160%, but the market share only increased by 63% during the same period. The supply grew faster than the demand, resulting in the price of the top three intelligent cat litter box products on Amazon dropping from about $600 to about $150.
The squeezed price space also reflects that the acceptance of intelligent pet supplies in the overseas market is relatively limited. According to industry insiders' estimates, the penetration rate of intelligent pet supplies with Internet of Things attributes in the United States is currently less than 20%.
Zhang Jian told us that after seeing the success of Birdfy on Amazon, Aisen Intelligence also launched a subscription service for pet health monitoring with the help of AI capabilities, but the sales were not as expected. "Although pet-keeping overseas is also developing towards refinement, it is difficult to compare with maternal and infant products."
Zhang Jian found that the pet-keeping habits of American users are relatively rough. Our customers in the United States are more concerned about whether the products are sturdy and durable, while Japanese customers require the appearance to be delicate and beautiful enough. However, the intelligent functions are still at a basic level, and the App operation interface of local products is also extremely simple compared with Chinese products.
Even so, both Zhang Jian and Amy believe that intelligence is an inevitable trend in the development of pet supplies. "At present, consumers are not buying it because the products are not mature enough to change consumers' perception. Just like before the appearance of the iPhone, everyone was quite satisfied with Nokia. Therefore, enterprises need to make firm and continuous investments and product iterations. In the long run, intelligent products are definitely the trend," Amy said.
03 Weak brand awareness and low repurchase rate: building user awareness through word-of-mouth and service
Although brands such as Petkit, Hommi, and Catlink have formed a certain brand influence in the domestic market and accumulated a large user group, due to the wide coverage and many sub-categories of pet supplies, the brand concentration is lower compared with pet food. According to Euromonitor data, in 2021, the CR5 (Concentration Ratio) of the global pet supplies industry was only 15.2%, and the market share of the American Central Garden & Pet Company, which ranks first in market size, was only 3.7%.
The low market concentration just creates opportunities for new entrants such as Aisen Intelligence. Zhang Jian said, "Pet supplies are naturally products with weak brand awareness, similar to 3C products such as power banks. There are large channel brands such as Chewy in the European and American markets, but there has never been a global brand like DJI in the drone field. Therefore, product sales depend more on how to solve consumers' pain points and make consumers think the products are cool under the condition of high cost-performance."
Amy believes that pet supplies can learn from the way of building brands in maternal and infant products, form good product word-of-mouth through one or two differentiated and innovative hit products, and gradually build brand awareness.
Precisely because pet supplies are durable goods and the repurchase rate is not as high as that of pet food, Amy believes that relying on money-burning marketing methods to acquire customers and build brands cannot be established from a financial perspective. "Customers often only buy your products once, and it is unlikely to earn back the profit through subsequent repurchases. If the cost model of a single product is not well done, the high cost of the first customer acquisition may only lead to a faster failure. Moreover, exaggerated marketing of product functions and performance is more likely to disappoint users."
Secondly, in the mature market of pet supplies, the establishment of brand awareness cannot bypass the mainstream offline consumption channels, which is also one of the biggest challenges for Chinese enterprises going global. For example, Japan has a strong sense of protecting domestic brands. Enterprises wanting to enter the pet supplies market must first join local chambers of commerce or industry associations. Zhang Jian suggested that enterprises can use the form of a joint venture company to get the empowerment of local resources and gradually penetrate into offline channels.
After gaining a foothold in the Southeast Asian market, Petkit and Catlink also began to expand their business to the United States. Different from supply chain enterprises, new consumer brands with a stronger sense of their own brands mainly adopt a self-operated model of building independent websites and are not in a hurry to enter large pet supplies chain supermarkets with high traffic.
"After the brand influence is truly realized, the conditions that can be obtained when negotiating with these channels will be different. If you enter now, you can only accept贴牌and a very low supply price, and you cannot accumulate real brand capabilities," Amy said.
【Reference Articles】
1. "Analysis of Sub - tracks in the Pet Industry - In - depth Report on the Agriculture, Forestry, Animal Husbandry and Fishery Industry", Wanlian Securities
2. "Looking at the Overseas Expansion Strategy of Domestic Pet Products from Yuanfei Pet", Hua'an Securities
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4. "Dialogue with CATLINK: The Key Behind Winning in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam", 36Kr Overseas Expansion
5. "Rushing Overseas! The Billion - level Intelligent Pet Supplies Track is in the Ascendant, but a 'Competition Crisis' Appears on the Way? | EBRUN Global Good Products", Yibang Power Network
This article is from the WeChat public account "Hangzhou Qiantang Enterprise Overseas Expansion Service Base", author: Zhejiang Enterprises Going Global, published with Qiantang's authorization.
