Thai producers urged to focus on cat-food market in Japan

The advice to focus on exports of cat foods to Japan came from the Hiroshima office of the Thai Department of International Trade Promotion (DITP).

Phannee Suwanpinton, chief of the DITP Hiroshima office, said Japanese people are experiencing the so-called pet-humanisation trend and consider themselves pet parents.

She said statistics from last year show that more Japanese people raise cats or dogs than children under 15 years old.

She said Japanese pet parents were willing to pay a lot for their pets, so Japan could be a very attractive market for Thai exporters of pet foods.

In particular, cats have replaced dogs as the most popular pets in Japan, she added.

Phannee said dogs used to be the No 1 pets in Japan until cats replaced them in 2014, and cats have remained the top pets in Japan since then.

Last year, there were 9.07 million households with pet cats, or 8.69% of Japanese households.

Phannee said spending for pet dogs in Japan was on the downtrend in contrast with the spending for pet cats.

The spending for pet dogs in Japan in 2017 was 1.60 million yen and continued to rise to 2.51 million in 2022 before falling to 2.45 million yen last year.

The spending for pet cats in Japan was 1.08 million yen in 2017 and rose to 1.50 million yen last year.

According to the Trade Policy and Strategy Office, Thailand was ranked the sixth exporter of pet foods in 2022 and ranked third when focused only on foods for dogs and cats. The value of exports of Thai pet foods in 2022 was US$2.803 billion, or 3.36% of the global pet-food exports.

Last year the value of Thai pet-food exports shrank to $2.464 billion.
Japan became the second marker after the US for Thai exports of cats’ and dogs’ foods last year with an export value of $330 million.