São Paulo – Cat food, cat toys, cat houses, cat medicine, cat toiletry, cat stuff. Whenever they go in a pet shop, residents of Arab countries are mostly looking for stuff for their felines. However, as pet dogs become more and more of a thing in the Arab world, so do products intended for them.
ANBA discussed the subject with the Commercial Intelligence coordinator at Instituto Pet Brasil, Marcos Lélis. “Their pet of choice is the cat, but dogs are coming up,” he said. According to him, that is mostly the case with Arab countries that are in the process of opening up and welcoming growing numbers of expatriates, like the UAE.
While Arabs favor cats and look to dogs mostly for safety, Westerners regard canines as friends. And as more of them flock to Arab cities to live and work, their habits tend to spread around. “The more Western and foreign people are around, the more dogs will be around,” he said.
This makes it easier for Brazilian pet product manufacturers to explore Arab markets. Brazil boasts vast expertise in the field, since almost half the homes in Brazil have dogs for pets. But the Brazilian industry also makes food and items for cats, birds, fish and all kinds of animals. “Brazil is the fourth biggest market for pets in the world, so we have a good-sized production volume,” says Lélis.
Brazil is very strong in agriculture, which is where most pet products come from, and this gives it a head start when it comes to international markets, the coordinator explained. “We make mostly pet food, but of course, we also make all the rest,” says Lélis, referring to toys, clothes, houses, etc.
As per Instituto Pet Brasil numbers, 2019 saw 2.85 tons of pet food made in Brazil. Pet food is a major Brazilian export product. Last year, revenue from pet product exports came out to USD 295 million, with food accounting for 90%. According to Lélis, the bulk of exports go to Latin American countries.
A market to tap into
The Arab market for pet products is being targeted by the Brazilian industry lately. The UAE are one of the target-markets of an industry internationalization program from Instituto Pet Brasil and the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil). The UAE pet product market was discussed in a webinar hosted by the institute and featuring the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC) early this month.
“We are aware that the UAE are a launchpad into other Arab markets,” said Lélis. The project has seen industry players join trade shows in the UAE in a bid to break into the market. Instituto Pet Brasil Business Intelligence coordinator Lélis notes that the organization started to look to that market about three years ago.
As per ABCC figures, last year saw Arab countries as a whole import USD 862 million worth of pet products – USD 7.5 million of that came from Brazil. Though not much, this was an 85% increase over 2018. The best-selling items were cat and dog food and food preparations.
According to Lélis, although the UAE are not as big a market as Brazil, it’s an attractive one in some aspects. “Expenditure per pet is very high compared with Brazil,” he claims. Moreover, the market is not as concentrated, which means more space for new companies, and consumption tends to go up. The embracing of Western habits is one of the reasons why the market is expected to expand.
Company at home
In Brazil, pet product sales have gone up during the Covid-19 pandemic – by 4% year-on-year in Q1. Marcos Lélis believes that this is a worldwide phenomenon, and one most prevalent in the places worst hit by the pandemic. “People have stayed at home, so they wound up taking better care of their pets, and some have gotten themselves a little pet because they were lonely,” he told ANBA.
According to Lélis, pets are deeply tied to demographics and urbanization issues. The more elderly, children and single people there are in a country, the more pets there are as well. “Besides, the more urbanized a society is, the more pets it’ll have,” he says.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
