Household service providers in Xiamen see robust growth

Home King, a Xiamen-based home services platform, has seen rapid growth in its sales revenue, fueled by growing demand for household services, especially from young consumers.

The company said it plans to further expand its market share at home and abroad.

While high-quality housekeeping services have helped build up its reputation, the online platform has expanded beyond just cleaning.

Home King is developing new offerings such as at-home pet bathing and annual subscription plans for home repairs, said its founder and CEO Li Bin.

The company has launched services in 65 domestic cities. Besides rising demand from young Chinese consumers, it also has many foreign customers, especially in Shanghai.

"We have seen a growing demand for household services from Chinese consumers. Young people have indicated an increasingly strong awareness for hiring domestic helpers to help them with household chores," Li said.

Yuan Xili, a domestic service helper, has been working for more than 10 years at Home King in Xiamen. Yuan, whose salary is about 10,000 yuan ($1,400) a month, said she is satisfied with the stable income source.

"Some new employees have been learning with me as apprentices, and they were born in the 1990s or after the year 2000. In the past few years, demand has been growing, as many young people tend to hire domestic helpers instead of doing the cleaning work themselves," Yuan said.

Xiamen has been encouraging household service enterprises to expand into emerging service areas, further enrich the supply of products and services, and better meet consumers' personalized and quality-oriented demands. Besides Home King, the city is home to a number of household service companies, such as Ujoy and Haobangni.

From 2022 to 2024, the compound annual growth rate of Xiamen's household service sector's gross merchandise volume reached 2,032 percent, which is more than double the average growth rate of the 15 sub-provincial cities in China, according to the local government of Xiamen.

Meanwhile, the central government has reiterated the need to effectively unleash potential in domestic demand, encourage goods consumption and foster new growth drivers of service consumption.

The Ministry of Commerce is also set to introduce new policies in September to help promote service consumption, leveraging fiscal and financial tools to enhance service supply capacity and stimulate new growth momentum.

"Currently, the main challenge in China's service consumption lies in the insufficient supply of high-quality services," said Sheng Qiuping, vice-minister of commerce, during a recent news conference in Beijing.

The ministry said it will help expand the pilot opening-up of fields such as telecommunications, medical care and education, and include more service consumption-related fields in the catalog of encouraging foreign investment.

Besides, the ministry will help promote the reform and innovation of the service sector by stimulating the vitality of various business entities and expanding the supply of diversified services such as healthcare, elderly care, childcare and household services, thus better meeting consumer demand.

"It's very good that the government will continue to help boost the growth of services consumption. Hiring household service helpers has increasingly become a necessity for many residents, instead of a luxury," Li of Home King said.

Meanwhile, Home King has continued to expand its presence overseas. The company has established a branch in the Philippines, and it plans to further expand in US cities such as New York.

In the Philippines, it has hired more than 60 local employees, and mainly provides services to local Chinese consumers.

In the first half of this year, China's total import and export value of services reached 3.9 trillion yuan, up 8 percent year-on-year, a record high, according to the Ministry of Commerce.