Chinafotopress

At 7 am on a stifling Beijing summer morning in July, Li Rulai, 71, waited with his wife and several other retirees in their 60s and 70s for a bus nearby their apartment building.

Picked up from their leafy surroundings, the group was dropped off at the offices of Beijing Puzhongtong Biotechnology (北京普中堂生物科技有限公司), in a nondescript office building around the east fourth ring road. Li, along with dozens of others, listened patiently to the company’s sponsored lectures on bone health and nutrition in hard-backed chairs from “a very good fellow who graduated from Peking University ...... for goods and services. Quality is still an issue, however, as most at-home caretakers are still found by word of mouth, and many families complain of their quality of care and high turnover rates.

But despite the unmistakable emergence of the Chinese elderly as an important demographic, only a few companies have seized the opportunity to treat them as one, and those companies are seeing the rewards. “I believe a booming silver market is just around the corner,” says Pinetree’s Wang.