By Liangping Gao and Marius Zaharia
BEIJING/HONG KONG, Sept 17 (Reuters) – Sun Guangqing’s prefabricated homes factory in China opened in 2022 just as the property sector entered a prolonged crisis and only months before Beijing lifted pandemic curbs, developments that crippled its two main sources of demand.
For Hebei Shengtai Integrating Housing, survival required a rapid pivot. The company moved beyond container-style quarantine units and temporary worker accommodation to produce more stylish prefab homes aimed at export markets.
“Any factory wants to survive,” said Sun, 41, the head of production and design at the factory in the northern city of Hengshui. “When domestic sales plunge, factories must find other markets and foreign markets are larger.”
He says most of his industry peers are now making capsule homes and luxurious foldable cabins for the tourism and vacation property industries overseas, showcasing the ability of the world’s largest manufacturing base to rapidly adapt and upgrade its products for consumers abroad.
China’s prefabricated building exports rose to $4.3 billion in 2025 from $1.7 billion in 2020, with the U.S., Southeast Asia, Australia, and Western Europe as key markets, customs data show.
While that is just a fraction of China’s massive $1.2 trillion trade surplus last year, the industry’s shift from domestic to foreign sales is emblematic of a post-pandemic export boom that worried Western capitals dub ‘China shock 2.0’.
China’s export juggernaut, which the West fears is gutting local industries and torching jobs, will dominate the agenda at a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping next week.
Expectations for the meeting are modest, though, not least because Beijing has grown increasingly self-assured that no rival can match its industrial machine for scale and efficiency, demonstrating its ability to expand in foreign markets despite steeper tariffs.
For Sun, the fiercest competition comes not from foreign rivals but from the more than 1,000 prefab-home factories across China. Hengshui alone has around 30.
He is unfazed by the prospect of additional trade barriers, because other countries “genuinely have the demand” and “our production speed and efficiency right now are something no other country can match.”
His firm builds a home in as little as 15 to 25 days and delivers it overseas within three months. Comparable homes produced locally in many markets often take far longer and cost more, he said.
China’s export boom “is happening regardless of tariffs, geopolitical instability, logistics disruptions, oil prices and all sorts of political narratives,” said Hao Dong, senior lecturer in management at the University of Southampton.
Perceptions of “Made in China” products are improving noticeably, he said.
“I cannot imagine anything that would effectively stop the trend, except for extremely radical developments such as wars,” he added.
TIGHTLY-KNIT, LOCAL, COMPLETE SUPPLY CHAINS
June Liu, a saleswoman at Qingdao Jingcheng Metal Technology, which sells factory-built homes from Weifang in eastern China, said domestic manufacturers enjoy a cost edge from cheaper labour, integrated local supply chains and large-scale production.
Steel structures, insulation panels, doors, windows and other parts are all available in and around her city of 9 million, while the port of Qingdao is only a two-hour drive away.
“It’s all nearby,” Liu said. “In Weifang, there’s one street where you drive for 20 minutes and all you see left and right is factories.”
The cheapest, container-like houses have a pre-shipping cost of less than 6,800 yuan ($1,000), while A-frame double-wing homes cost more than 100,000 yuan, Liu said. Some clients want them equipped with furniture, water heaters, air conditioners and other appliances, which the firm sources from Chinese brands including Hisense and Haier.
By contrast, U.S. producers are facing rising costs for materials and a persistent shortage of skilled construction workers, said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the Washington-based National Association of Home Builders.
He said the U.S. imported more than 70,000 prefabricated building kits in 2025, about 40% of which came from China.
PROFIT SQUEEZE
Behind the export triumph, however, lies a bruising price war at home.
What some view as scale-driven efficiency, others see as overcapacity that is squeezing profits and threatening the industry’s long-term viability and the jobs they created.
Sun said his company has slashed the price of its popular double-wing expandable house by more than half to below 20,000 yuan, amid intensifying competition, leaving profit of just 1,000-2,000 yuan per unit.
“Too many prefab home factories chase export orders, squeezing margins and creating a vicious cycle that has driven down prices,” he said, adding he expects more than one-third of the industry to shut down in coming years.
The operations manager at another factory in Hengshui, Pang Hufeng, also decries profits per unit of “hundreds of yuan.”
His firm, Hebei Shengshuo Metal Products, also started as a domestically focused producer, but now about 80% of its sales go abroad.
Manufacturers in Hebei, the northern province Hengshui is part of, are “pretty competitive,” said Pang, weighing on prices. Yet he argued the same forces are making Chinese products more competitive abroad, helping sustain export demand.
“Low prices and rapid deployment will continue to support overseas demand,” he said.
($1 = 6.7095 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
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