(Yicai) May 15 -- Foreign construction material and sound insulation technology companies are eyeing new opportunities arising from China’s introduction of enhanced sound insulation standards for residential buildings.

With higher mandatory sound insulation standards for residential buildings, the scale of China’s sound insulation material market is expected to reach hundreds of billions of Chinese yuan, equal to tens of billions of US dollars, Yan Guojun, director of the Acoustic Environment Research Center at the China Academy of Building Research, said at an industry forum on May 12.

China implemented new national standards for residential buildings to meet people’s demand for improved living quality on May 1. They include a minimum ceiling of three meters for new residential buildings, mandatory elevators for structures with four or more floors, and enhanced sound insulation standards for walls and floors.

In terms of impact sound insulation performance, the previous requirement was within 75 decibels, and 80 decibels for rural houses, according to Yan. The new standards set the maximum limit at 65 decibels.

Even if China’s new residential housing area drops to 600 million square meters from 700 million sqm a year, demand for sound insulation materials will still increase, Yan noted. Moreover, the country has over 40 billion sqm in existing residential housing area, so even if only one million sqm requires renovation annually, there will still be plenty of demand for soundproof material, he added.

“Good solutions certainly rely on good materials,” Li Tao, strategic market director for Asia Pacific at US chemicals giant Huntsman, told the media at the forum.

A series of automotive soundproof solutions Huntsman co-developed with automotive brands such as Mercedes-Benz can be applied to residential buildings, he noted, adding that the company hopes to make more efforts to promote these solutions in the construction industry.

“In recent years, Huntsman has significantly increased its investment in noise reduction technology research and development, which is an important strategy for us in China, the Asia-Pacific region, and even the world,” Li pointed out.

China’s building sound insulation materials and solutions market has a huge potential, said John Thompson, chief executive officer of UK residential sound insulation certification company Robust Details.

Robust Details is willing to increase its investments in China, and it has the capability and intention to provide technical support to improve the sound insulation quality of buildings in China, Thompson noted.

The architectural acoustic system solutions provided by Huntsman have received international certification from Robust Details and have been applied in residential projects in Shanghai.

With improved national standards and market application scale, more high-performance, low-cost sound insulation products will be developed, Yan predicted.

Research from the Acoustic Environment Research Center showed that enhancing sound insulation capability will likely lead to an increase in construction costs of about CNY100 (USD13.8) per sqm of building area. However, as the market expands, the additional construct on costs are expected to decline.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione