China’s hearing aid industry has developed rapidly

In the past 20 years, China’s hearing aid industry has developed rapidly, especially in terms of the growth rate of fitting points and sales volume, which are far ahead of the world average development level. The world’s major multinational corporations have long established their manufacturing bases in China, or cooperated or set up wholly-owned factories, which greatly promoted the rapid development of China’s hearing aid industry. The top 6 hearing aid manufacturers in the world: Germany’s Siemens, Switzerland’s Fengli, Denmark’s AAC, Denmark’s Oticon, Denmark’s Weinstein, and Starkey in the US have all entered the Chinese market, like Stark in the United States. And AAC, Denmark, have established large-scale hearing aid production bases in Nanjing and Xiamen, respectively. Canada’s Unicorn and Lisheng also entered the Chinese market.

However, the development of domestic hearing aid companies has shrunk severely, and domestic products have struggled to sell in the domestic market. The market share of foreign products or Sino-foreign joint venture products has exceeded 90%, showing a tendency of being blocked and colonized by foreign brands. Although domestic or joint-venture products still dominated at the beginning of the reform and opening up, with the establishment of wholly-owned bases by multinational enterprises, almost all domestic products have withdrawn from the mainstream market.

With the development of acoustics, electronics, and computer technology, hearing aids have entered a stage of rapid development that has never been seen before. Hearing aids will become more and more demanding in the future, and its development trend will inevitably develop in the direction of digitalization. Digital hearing aids will face enormous challenges from new technologies. The following areas are expected to have huge development potential:

1. Energy consumption will further decrease. Perform more calculations within the existing energy consumption range or maintain existing computing power to reduce energy consumption, or use smaller batteries.

2. Increase the number of components in the fixed area of ​​the chip, so that more complex signal processing can be performed on the chip area, or keep the number of components unchanged to further reduce the chip, and its operation speed will further decrease.

3. Future technology can etch tiny mechanical devices and electronic components on the chip together, which is called microelectromechanical system. Applying this technology to hearing aids may help reduce the size and energy consumption of hearing aids.

4. There are new ideas for the optional production of hearing aids, such as three-dimensional imaging of the external auditory canal through ultrasound imaging scanning technology. This can replace the conventional ear sampling technology to manufacture a custom-made hearing aid housing. At present, this technology has been put into practice, and it is expected that we can immediately see new achievements in hearing technology.

5. Others: Integrate the powerful capabilities of the computer into future hearing aids, such as digitally transmitting the noise-reducing remote microphone into the computer of the hearing aid, combining the computer in the hearing aid with a fully digital mobile phone , So that the hearing aid has a telephone function.

The latest domestic data shows that the number of hearing-impaired people in China is as high as 27.8 million, ranking first among the five major disabilities, accounting for 1.67% of the total population of China. As for children, there are still 2-3 million new hearing-impaired children every year. After the liberalization of the comprehensive two-child policy, as the birth rate of newborns increases, coupled with the increase in the number of elderly women, environmental pollution and other factors, this number will increase significantly. In the elderly, hearing loss occurs in about one-third of the elderly population over the age of 65.

Studies have shown that one in five hearing-impaired people can benefit from wearing hearing aids or cochlear implants. But currently there are only a few hundred thousand fittings for 27.8 million hearing-impaired people, that is, only one of at least 30 hearing-impaired people wears it.

Second, 2017-2022 China’s hearing aid industry market development forecast

Due to the low proportion of hearing-impaired people wearing hearing aids in China, the hearing aid industry in China will have a large market size in the future, which is expected to be 5 billion yuan in 2020.