Japan nappy maker shifts from babies to adults

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A Chinese manufacturer of babies has announced that it will quit producing diapers for infants in the nation and instead will concentrate on the market for individuals.

Oji Holdings is the most recent business to make a similar move in a country that is quickly aging, with baby costs at a record low.

For more than a decade, selling of child nappies in the nation have outperformed those of infants.

The number of children born in Japan in 2023- 758, 631- was over by 5.1 % from the previous month.

The birthrate in Japan was the lowest since the 19th centuries. In the 1970s, that number stood at more than two million.

In a speech, Oji Holdings said its company, Oji Nepia, already manufactures 400 million child nappies annually. Manufacturing has been falling since 2001, when the corporation hit its maximum- 700 million nappies.

Again in 2011, Japan’s biggest baby manufacturer, Unicharm, said its income of adult babies had surpassed those for children.

Meanwhile, the adult diaper market has been growing and is estimated to be worth more than$ 2bn ( £1.6bn ). Japan now has one of the world’s oldest communities, with about 30 % of them aged 65 or older. Next time, the proportion of those aged above 80 crossed 10 % for the first time.

Oji Holdings added that it would continue to produce baby wipes in Malaysia and Indonesia, where it anticipates that desire will increase.

A shrinking people, the result of both age and plummeting delivery costs, has become a crisis for Japan, the world’s fifth- largest market. However, the Chinese president’s efforts to address these issues have so far been unsuccessful.

Increased spending on child-related programs and subsidies for young couples or parents do n’t appear to be raising birth rates. Experts claim that the reasons for the lower union rates and more women entering the workforce as well as the higher costs of raising children are complicated.

Japan is” standing on the brink of whether we can continue to exist as a society,” said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida next year, adding that it was a case of” now or never.”

But Japan is not alone. Ovulation levels have also been dropping in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, the last of which has the lowest delivery rate in the world.

China, like Japan, introduced a number of incentives to increase birth rates, as well as a second time in a row in 2023. However, China’s people is getting older and the effects of a decades-long one-child plan, which ended in 2015, are also putting people in a position of difficulty.