Go North: The Path to Performance-Driven Profits in China's Construction Materials Market

China’s construction industry has represented a cornerstone of the country’s economic growth in recent years. While such growth cannot go on in perpetuity, new drivers, regulations, and constraints are emerging to create a very different opportunity, where materials developers can and must play a critical role. Front and center in that are the building thermal envelope materials pivotal in addressing the high heating and cooling component of China’s vast and growing building inventory. China’s demand for building thermal envelope materials from 2012-2015 will be 5,570 million m², but there is structure to this at the provincial level. For high-performance thermal envelope solutions, climate is the major driver for determining the market prospects, with Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, and Xinjiang being the provincial markets where advanced building thermal envelope solutions make economic sense. Provided appropriate local relationships are established in the locations with greatest need, developers of phase-change materials, vacuum insulation panels, and low-emissivity (low-e) insulating glass are set to parlay these and similar provinces’ predicaments into growth, while aerogel and electrochromic glass developers will be left wanting.