Chinese people are abandoning expensive cemeteries; listed companies in the funeral industry are "losing their soul"

Author | Giant Tides Old Fish

Editor | Yang Xuran

In the past year of 2025, it was destined to be a year of “soul severance” for listed companies in the funeral industry.

As the “first funeral stock,” Fushouyuan has yet to announce its full-year performance for 2025, but from the semi-annual financial report of 2025, this company, which once had a market value close to HKD 10 billion, is likely to face its first loss since going public.

On the other hand, Fucheng Co.'s burial plot-related business has seen a slight rebound, but its revenue scale is only half of that in 2019; Anxianyuan China has fallen into a quagmire of losses with continuously sluggish performance; even smaller companies like Wantongyuan and China Life Group are facing crises of collapsing performance or long-term stagnation.

This raises the question: Given the deepening aging population in China, the funeral industry, which seems to be a “necessity among necessities,” should logically see leading companies steadily grow in this trend, yet related companies have collectively stalled.

The answer is not complicated and is becoming clearer: increasingly open-minded Chinese people are voting with their feet, completely abandoning those absurdly priced high-end cemeteries. It is not an exaggeration to say that a consumption revolution in the funeral industry is quietly occurring.

01 Chill

To understand the “chill” in the funeral industry, one must first discuss the collapse of Fushouyuan’s performance—this company’s predicament is a microcosm of the entire traditional funeral industry.

In 2024, Fushouyuan’s net profit attributable to the parent company was CNY 373 million, a staggering 52.8% year-on-year drop. This marks the first significant decline in net profit since 2010, ending the company’s “profit myth.”

By the first half of 2025, the situation worsened, with revenue of approximately CNY 611 million, a year-on-year decrease of 44.5%, and a net loss of CNY 261 million. Not only did revenue plummet, but it also marked the first half-year loss since going public.

This downward trend is not just a predicament for Fushouyuan alone but a common dilemma for nearly all related companies.

Fucheng Co.'s revenue from burial plot sales, management, and funeral services has declined from CNY 227 million in 2017 to less than CNY 100 million by 2024, landing at CNY 98 million; its gross profit margin has also fallen from 86.78% in 2017 to 78.51% in 2024. Although it remains high, the downward trend is irreversible.

Apart from Fucheng Co., Anxianyuan China’s revenue from sales of burial and niche plots peaked in 2023 and has been on the decline ever since, now deeply in the red.

China Wantongyuan experienced a brief performance rebound in 2023, achieving a net profit of CNY 17.6 million, but this good fortune was short-lived, with performance dropping again in 2024 and a direct loss of CNY 9.39 million in the first half of 2025, making the downward trend hard to reverse.

Moreover, the Hong Kong-listed China Life Group has been stuck in a long-term stagnation, continuously losing money since 2023, with a net loss attributable to the parent company of CNY 4.803 million in the first half of 2025.

Seeing these figures, many people may ask: Has the demand in the funeral market decreased? The answer is clearly no.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s mortality rate has remained high over the past 20 years, with the 8.04‰ in 2025 being the highest in nearly two decades.

Meanwhile, data from Tianyancha shows that the number of registered funeral-related companies has been steadily increasing over the past five years, reaching a recent peak in 2025. This indicates that both market demand and industry supply are in a stage of continuous growth. The cooling of traditional cemetery companies is not due to a shrinking market capacity.

So where exactly is the problem with traditional cemetery companies collectively stalling?

The answer is simple: “price” is the core issue of this industry.

02 Disillusionment

The Chinese have a long-standing tradition of “lavish burials” or treating the deceased as if they were alive.

The classic satirical film “Filial Sons and Virtuous Grandsons” vividly depicts this reality: the filial son, played by Chen Peisi, spends the family’s fortune to give his mother a grand funeral, reflecting the blind pursuit of “lavish burials” in society at the time.

Relying on this tradition of “lavish burials” and scarce land resources, the core logic of funeral companies has become simple and crude. Continuously raising prices to earn excessive profits has become the gold-digging tool for this “underground real estate” industry.

Annual reports show that between 2012 and 2017, the price of Fushouyuan’s customized artistic graves increased from CNY 259,800 to CNY 421,800, while finished artistic graves grew from CNY 89,600 to CNY 100,800, and only traditional finished graves dropped from CNY 49,100 to CNY 40,300.

Since 2017, Fushouyuan has not disclosed the unit prices of various product types but has grouped them under operational burial plots, yet prices have continued to rise. By 2024, the average price of a single burial plot at Fushouyuan has exceeded CNY 120,000.

If calculated at 2 square meters per burial plot, Fushouyuan’s price per burial plot exceeds CNY 60,000 per square meter, surpassing the housing prices in over 90% of Chinese cities, comparable to first-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

Such high prices have sustained the high gross profit margins of funeral companies for years.

Over the past 12 years, Fushouyuan’s average gross profit margin has exceeded 80%, earning the nickname “underground Moutai.” In 2023, its gross profit margin even reached 92.8%. Additionally, Fucheng Co.'s funeral business segment and Wantongyuan’s gross profit margins have generally maintained around 80%.

In contrast, even during the peak period, the gross profit margin of real estate companies only hovers around 30%.

This situation is not an isolated case; in 2023, Shanghai Songhuyuan was reported to have burial plots priced as high as CNY 760,000 per square meter, three times the price of the prestigious Tomson Riviera. Even more absurdly, to stimulate consumption, some funeral companies attempted to launch “burial plot mortgage” services.

However, the continuously rising burial plot prices have finally faced backlash from market sentiment.

More and more people are beginning to understand that the remembrance of the deceased has never been reflected in expensive burial plots and grand funerals; the heartfelt longing and companionship during their lifetime are far more meaningful than these external forms. Eco-friendly sea burials and tree burials have emerged, and the phenomenon of “ashes niches” is a silent protest against high-priced burial plots.

The shift in funeral concepts has directly led to a sharp decrease in demand for high-priced burial plots, becoming a primary reason for the collapse of burial companies’ performances.

In 2024, Fushouyuan sold 12,569 operational burial plots, a decrease of 3,816 from 2023, a drop of over 23%, meaning that one in every four burial plots could not be sold. In the first half of 2025, Fushouyuan’s downturn showed no signs of improvement, with the number of operational burial plots sold at only 6,253, a year-on-year decrease of 6.7%. Although the decline has narrowed, it clearly indicates that the contraction of demand for traditional burial plots has already shown an irreversible trend.

The resistance is not only evident in sales numbers. In the first half of 2025, the average selling price of Fushouyuan’s operational burial plots plummeted from CNY 120,700 per plot in the same period of 2024 to CNY 63,400 per plot, a staggering year-on-year drop of 47.5%.

China Wantongyuan also stated when forecasting losses for 2025 that the first reason for turning from profit to loss was “impacted by the macro economy and cautious consumer spending, leading to a decrease in the selling price of burial plots.”

Once high-priced burial plots now can only be massively discounted to promote sales. Clearly, companies have realized that the high-priced route is no longer viable.

03 Final Chapter

From the current trend, the market space for high-priced burial plots will gradually shrink. Apart from changes in consumer concepts, it is also the result of the joint action of consumer subjects and policy environments.

The backdrop of consumption downgrade has shifted people’s consumption concepts from “pursuing face” to “pursuing practicality,” and more people are choosing to refuse such unnecessary “luxury consumption” as high-priced burial plots. Fushouyuan’s semi-annual financial report for 2025 also clearly mentioned that “customers’ consumption behavior is becoming cautious,” which is one of the core reasons for the decline in performance.

At the same time, the “guiding hand” of policies is also strongly directing the funeral industry towards a conclusion for high-priced burial plots. The Central Document No. 1 of 2025 explicitly states the need to “deepen funeral reform and promote the construction of public ecological burial facilities.”

Local governments are also introducing specific policies to encourage the public to choose eco-friendly burials. The Shenzhen government specifies that for registered residents who die and undergo cremation, and for non-registered residents who die in Shenzhen and undergo cremation while participating in eco-friendly burial, the handlers can apply for rewards, with sea burials offering CNY 3,000 per set of ashes; subsidy standards in places like Guangxi and Fujian range from CNY 1,600 to CNY 3,000 per set, with some pilot areas in Guizhou offering subsidies as high as CNY 5,000.

In the face of market trend changes, burial companies are also actively seeking transformation.

The most mainstream direction is to leverage digitalization and technology to shift the funeral industry from “physical preservation” to “digital immortality.”

For example, Fushouyuan has built a digital life service system through four core functions: digital memorial hall, AI memorial, Fushou Online, and memorial family origin. Its “Memorial Family Origin” cloud memorial platform has accumulated over 2 million users, and the registered users of the “Fushou Online” mini-program have exceeded 117,000.

Anxianyuan China also stated in its annual report that it has “taken the lead in embracing the digital wave” and has launched a smart life experience space that integrates AI interaction, cloud memorial, and immersive farewell ceremonies.

Wantongyuan mentioned in its semi-annual report that it aims to “upgrade online memorial services.”

However, in reality, regardless of which company it is, their digital and intelligent technologies and services are relatively basic. They are currently limited to online memorials, AI digital humans, and other areas. In the rapidly developing context of AI technology, these services have minimal technical barriers and are not sufficient to become a “moat” for the companies, serving more as additional services to existing businesses.

Similar situations are expected. These burial companies, originally centered on land resources as their core competitive advantage, are far removed from technology companies and lack technological genes. Achieving a technological transformation to carve out a second growth curve for the companies clearly cannot be accomplished overnight.

For the sake of current livelihoods, the only way forward for burial companies remains to reduce prices.

This inevitably means that the final chapter of high-priced burial plots is still being written and has not yet reached its conclusion.

The end of high-priced burial plots is not a bad thing; rather, it is something to be grateful for. It allows us to re-examine the connotations of filial piety and matters of life and death. Perhaps, not allowing remembrance to be tied to price is the true value pursuit of the funeral industry.

As Tao Yuanming wrote in his poem, “What to say of death, entrust the body to the mountains.” This line expresses the truest end of life—life comes from nature and ultimately returns to nature. People’s remembrance of the deceased has never relied on expensive burial plots, but rather on the deep-seated longing hidden in their hearts.

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