There is statistics comparing toilet seat penetration rate across China, Korea, and Japan. The result is surprising:
| Country | Toilet Seat Penetration Rate |
| China | 2% |
| Korea | 56% |
| Japan | 87% |
Why is the statistics differ so much? If you being travelled to Japan or browsing the web, you will see toilet seat looks like this:
A very nice looking toilet seat selling at a premium price, offering multiple feature such as anti-bacteria, self-washing bowl, heated seat, and even you can attach to your existing toilet.
Nowadays, more and more China people is willing to travel to Japan to buy toilet seat with selling price of RMB 20k. Somemore these category of buyer coming from China middle class with rational consumption in mind and no easy to persuade by advertisement. When these buyers group largely appear, it indicate the turning point of conventional industry transformation. And these phenomena raise an issue to conventional manufacturer at China.
First, is fading of low cost advantage. The achievement of “Made In China” no matter it is domestic market or international market, there is only one core competence which is low cost advantage. Previously, China do have advantage in terms of abundant land, low cost human labour and low tax, and no action will be taken for environmental issue created, leading to low cost advantage. However, this advantage is fading with increasing cost across time.
Second, the crashing of distribution channel advantage. The local China companies being constructed Multi-Level and Pyramid based of sale distribution network for many years. Now, e-commerce enterprise such as Alibaba and JD has been reform the way of information flow and logistic flow, causing flattening of distribution channel.
Third, the fear of transformation changes. The transformation has been alarming the China local industry for many years with lots of new developed terms smart hardware, 3D printing, and fourth revolution. Yet, most of the 50s and 60s baby boomer is not fully understand the concept.
The toilet seat is consider as conventional industry, yet, whether if they can thriving across generations is depend on technical breakthrough and innovation of concept.
There is no sunset industry in this world, only sunset enterprise and mindset does.
