Talking About Waterproofing in China With A Senior Civil Engineer

by Eric Chen

During the national holidays, I stayed home and met one senior engineer who has worked in the field of construction in Guangzhou for more than 20 years. Some information from him is helpful for a few glimspes of waterproofing industry in China, especially in Guangdong.

Is the Chinese waterproofing industry growing? Yes. But not healthily. With the hot investment in real estate and other infrastrutural projects, the demand for waterproofing materials from roofing membrane to geotextile is undoubtfully rising. But only in term of quantity but not revenue.

Why? For example, the price of roofing membrane in China has long been kept in a low level, coupled with the ever lower quality. In the market, you can easily find SBS membrane with a price of less than 20RMB (EUR 2) per square meter. Fierce competition makes them priced to sell. Manufacturers use cheap polyester felt, organic felt or glass felt as substrates to produce the products which probably cannot meet the national standard requirement. On the contrary, the ones meeting the standard are sold at price of more than 30 RMB per square meter. These qualified products are facing difficulty in the market because of the price. The waterproofing industry becomes totally price-oriented because the customers, i.e. the contractors, do not buy the expensive and qualified products but cheap and uneligible ones.

One may wonder whether the national standard works or not? The answer is only partly yes. Contractors use roofing membrane, but in most case they do not use qualified one. As the engineer told me, the civil engineers in fact will prefer a reinforced concrete layer working as a real waterproofing layer to a problematice membrane waterproofing layer. In practice, the membrane can hardly prevent leakage, he said. The buliding depends the concrete layer to resist water penetration. And the roof with concrete would prevent water penetration well even if there were not any roofing membrane on the top of it. They use roofing membrane only because the designer has identified the usage according to the national standard. In many projects people use the cheapest roofing membrane from the market and lay them on top of the real waterproofing concreate layer. His narration coincides the roofing manufactures' claim that they are difficult in operating products that meet the national standard.

With the increasing raw materials prices, especially those of alsphalt and polyester, the roofing membrane producers are facing tightening profit margin. And since most of the membrane producers in China are small and medium size companies, they are weak in negotiation power with the buy-side and in the mean time have to face fierce competition with the sell-side.

Statistics of 1H06 reveals that contrary to most sectors in building materials industry, waterproofing industry suffered from plunge in profit.

Nevertheless, the above described phenomenon does not necessarily mean that the waterproofing industry in China is dying. Forgetting about the standard and keeping the price as low as possible, one can sell. Who can accompany this? Those who illegitametly escape tax and use unqualified cheap substrates such as organic felt or cheap polyester felts. Most of the market players fall in this group. The rest are waterproofing materials for large and important national projects such as olympic projects. They should meet the standard and use qualified roofing felt. But the market amount is limited.

One may conclude that the lack of execution of regulations and codes lead to the wide spread of low quality products. Corruption is one reason, but engineering requirement is another important reason. If the contractors and the final customers, the residents do not urge the use of qualified and relatively higher price roofing membrane, the situation that unqualified products dominate the market will last.