The glasses industry is an ancient industry, and the modern sense of eyeglass online appeared in the last century.
In the West, crystal lenses were created by the Neo-Assyrian civilization in BC, and Emperor Nero used jade as glasses when watching gladiator battles around the 1st century AD. In the Warring States period of our country, there are also discussions on light and flat mirror, convex mirror and concave mirror in Volume 15 of Mozi. At the end of the 13th century, the first pair of glasses was made in Italy, and a Dominican friar named Giordano first publicly proposed the concept of "glasses" in a sermon. The monocle, with its modern eyewear concept, first appeared in 1700 and became popular and became a high-end fashion accessory in the 19th century. It was not until the first 20 years of the last century that frame glasses became the current design. Until the 1940s, the Columbia Chemical branch of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in the United States discovered resin lenses, which greatly promoted the development of the glasses industry.
From its main purpose, glasses are optical devices used to correct vision, protect eyes or for decorative purposes, mainly composed of lenses and frames. The lens is the core carrier of the functional properties of glasses, which is used to realize the functions of vision correction and eye protection. The frame is usually composed of the frame, the mirror ring, the lens, the middle beam, the mirror leg and the nose bracket, etc. Its core function is matched with the lens to form the glasses, and it plays the role of a support on the face.
From the current development status of the eyewear industry, there are mainly the following three driving factors:
- The high number of myopia among teenagers has become an important social problem
With the popularization of the Internet, the proportion of myopic population in China is gradually rising, especially the rate of myopia among teenagers. According to the survey of the National Health Commission, the overall myopia rate of children and adolescents in China in 2020 is 52.7%, the myopia rate of junior high schools has jumped to 71.1%, and the myopia rate of high school students has reached more than 80%. The problem of myopia of teenagers has become a social problem that needs to be solved urgently. Paying attention to the eye health of teenagers is a "topic" that parents, schools and society need to pay enough attention to, which requires close contact and cooperation among three parties.
- Workers who are often "accompanied" by electronic products are also plagued by eye health
With the popularization of electronic products and the change of people's lifestyle, people's eye health problems such as myopia and dry eye are becoming more and more serious, and the eye health problems of professionals are prominent. On the one hand, the working population between 30 and 60 years old has become the main force of dry eye patients; On the other hand, more than 25% of workers face more than 8 hours of computer screen time every day at work, and more than 60% of workers said that they will continue to watch computers, mobile phones and other electronic screens after work, eye fatigue caused by excessive eye use is the main reason for blurred vision and decreased vision of workers.
- Eye health problems of middle-aged and elderly netizens have been increasing year by year
With the continuous iterative development of the Internet industry, "elderly netizens" have become veritable deep users. According to open data on the Internet, as of December 2022, the number of Internet users in China was 1.067 billion, and the proportion of Internet users aged 50 and above increased to 30.8%. The eye health problems of middle-aged and elderly people such as cataracts, myopia, presbyopia and so on are constantly amplified by more and more App applications. The elderly eye health problem is also a hot issue in the market, and meeting the needs of presbyopia groups is one of the future important development areas of the eyewear industry.
According to the professional edition data, there are more than 3.893 million glasses-related enterprises, and more than 157,000 new registered enterprises in January 2024, an increase of 152.1% compared with 2023;
From the perspective of geographical distribution, Hainan, Guangdong and Zhejiang ranked the top three in terms of the number of express service related enterprises, with more than 1,022,000, more than 287,000 and more than 270,000 respectively;
From the point of view of establishment time, 37.7% of the relevant enterprises were established within 1-5 years, and 53.1% of the relevant enterprises were established within 1 year.
