I. Why Zhejiang

In China's furniture manufacturing map, Guangdong is known for the sheer number of above-scale enterprises and for leading domestic custom-furniture brands. Zhejiang's comparative strength lies in two different areas: export volume and specialized industrial clusters.

In 2023, Zhejiang had 1,161 above-scale furniture manufacturers with a combined industrial output value of CNY 105.8 billion and revenues of CNY 111.9 billion. In the same year, export delivery value from Zhejiang's above-scale furniture enterprises reached CNY 44.6 billion. Measured by customs data, from January to October 2023 Zhejiang's furniture exports totaled USD 15.7 billion — 25.93% of the national total — ranking first among all provinces, neck and neck with Guangdong.

This "export number one" status is not accidental. Zhejiang furniture's real competitive advantage lies in a set of highly specialized industrial clusters that have, over decades of evolution, each mastered a distinct product category and built a density of supply-chain support that rivals cannot replicate quickly.

II. Anji: One in Every Three Chairs in China Ships from Here

No discussion of Zhejiang furniture begins anywhere other than Anji County.

Situated in northwestern Zhejiang, Anji has abundant bamboo resources and historically built its manufacturing identity on bamboo processing. Starting in the 1990s, the county gradually shifted its industrial center of gravity toward seating, leveraging bamboo and timber processing know-how alongside a local hardware ecosystem, and eventually formed a cluster dominated by swivel chairs and office chairs.

Today Anji is home to more than 1,200 chair enterprises, of which 313 are above-scale — more than half of the county's total above-scale industrial base. One in every three chairs sold nationally is made in Anji, and Anji accounts for half of China's total chair export volume. In terms of output, Anji's broader green-home furniture industry reached CNY 39.1 billion in gross output in 2024, with the chair sub-sector alone contributing CNY 31.2 billion; the above-scale chair output value in 2022 stood at CNY 26.2 billion.

Anji's success is not driven by a single flagship company but by collective cluster dynamics. Design studios, mold makers, hardware parts suppliers, gas springs, foam factories, upholstery mills, and packaging providers all operate within a radius of a few dozen kilometers. This fine-grained social division of labor compresses unit production costs to a level that competitors elsewhere in the country — or abroad — cannot readily undercut.

Anji has produced three main-board listed companies: Henglin (SH: 603661), Yongyi (SH: 603600), and Zhongyuan Home (SZ: 603279). Together they constitute Anji's listed-company matrix in the global office-chair market.

III. Haining: A County-Level City at the Top of National Sofa Exports

If Anji represents Zhejiang's chair industry, Haining represents the province's other major pole in upholstered furniture.

Haining sits in northern Zhejiang, close to both Hangzhou and Shanghai. The city is nationally known for its leather industry and warp-knitting (warp-knit technical textiles) sector. Both industries extend naturally downstream into genuine-leather and fabric sofas, giving Haining a built-in supply advantage in key input materials for sofa manufacturing.

Haining has been officially recognized as the "National Export Sofa Industry Base," and is one of Zhejiang province's eight designated specialty furniture regions. The city's sofa exports are directed primarily toward North America, Australia, and Europe. With local or nearby sourcing for hides, warp-knit fabric, and foam, Haining sofa factories have built a lead in delivery-speed control and SKU flexibility that has helped them penetrate the supply chains of major North American home-furnishing retail chains. Haining ranks first among China's county-level cities in sofa export value — the single most important node in Zhejiang's upholstered furniture export chain.

IV. Kuka Home: Zhejiang's Global Face in Soft Furniture

Among all furniture companies headquartered in Zhejiang, Kuka Home (SH: 603816, also known as Jason Furniture) is the largest by revenue and the most diversified by product range.

Founded in Hangzhou, Kuka Home built its business on upholstered furniture — primarily sofas and bed frames — and has extended it to dining chairs and whole-home furnishing solutions. In 2023, the company recorded revenues of CNY 19.2 billion, up 6.7% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders reached CNY 2.01 billion, up 10.7%. Domestic revenues were CNY 10.9 billion; overseas revenues were CNY 7.5 billion — both segments growing.

Sofa products generated roughly CNY 9.4 billion in revenue in 2023, and the bed category contributed CNY 4.1 billion. Internationally, Kuka has acquired German luxury brand ROLF BENZ and entered a strategic partnership with Italian brand NATUZZI, progressively repositioning its global product mix toward the premium segment. Taken alone, Kuka's annual revenues represent approximately 17% of the entire Zhejiang above-scale furniture industry's total revenues — a remarkable concentration of value in a single enterprise.

V. Henglin and Yongyi: Anji's Listed Chair Pair

Alongside Kuka, Henglin and Yongyi form the core listed-company tandem of Anji's chair cluster.

Henglin (SH: 603661) focuses on office chairs for global export and has invested aggressively in cross-border e-commerce channels. In 2023, the company achieved revenues of CNY 8.2 billion, up approximately 26% year on year. The Henglin growth model is a textbook example of dual-engine momentum: OEM export contracts provide scale and cash flow, while cross-border DTC channels deliver margin headroom.

Yongyi (SH: 603600), also headquartered in Anji, centers its business on office chairs while extending into ergonomic seating and functional sofas. In 2023, Yongyi reported revenues of CNY 3.54 billion and a net profit of CNY 298 million. The company holds roughly 11% of China's office-chair export market share by volume and counts several globally recognized office-furniture brands among its OEM clients.

Both companies illustrate the same underlying logic that drives Anji's competitiveness: achieve global scale efficiency in standardized products, then capture margin expansion through own-brand and DTC e-commerce — a shared strategy for staying ahead of cost competition from Vietnam and other emerging manufacturing locations.

VI. Yuhuan and Other Cluster Nodes

Zhejiang's furniture geography does not end with chairs and sofas.

Yuhuan carries the national designation "China European Classical Furniture Production Base." Products here center on carved European-style solid-wood furniture aimed at domestic and international mid-to-high-end markets. Yuhuan manufacturers have developed technical depth in woodcarving and complex solid-wood joinery, and the region has produced a cohort of brands that have built recognition in the European-style category nationally.

Xiaoshan (within Hangzhou) excels in outdoor furniture exports — aluminum-alloy and iron-frame garden and patio furniture shipped largely to European and North American garden-goods and home-improvement retail chains. Jiashan focuses on export solid-wood furniture, with proximity to the Port of Shanghai providing a logistics edge. Shaoxing has formed a concentration in soft mattress manufacturing.

Together these nine specialty regions give Zhejiang's furniture industry one of the most complete product-category footprints of any province: chairs, sofas, soft beds, solid wood, European-classical, and outdoor — each with a geographically concentrated, high-density production center. The underlying logic is Zhejiang's classic "specialty-town economy" model: one town or county masters one product line and pursues it to an extreme of efficiency.

VII. Upstream Supply-Chain Opportunities

The scale of Zhejiang's furniture manufacturing base creates substantial and recurring procurement demand across the entire supply chain:

  • Foam and fill materials: The principal input for sofas and soft beds; Zhejiang has some local foam suppliers, but large-volume procurement still draws on central China (Hubei Xiantao) and Guangdong
  • Leather and upholstery fabric: Haining's leather and warp-knit industries provide meaningful local sourcing for sofa factories; national fabric suppliers in Shaoxing and Fujian's Quanzhou remain major sources
  • Hardware components: Gas springs, chair bases, hinges, and drawer slides; Anji's cluster has an internal hardware ecosystem, but out-of-province suppliers still access the Anji supply chain as overall volumes expand
  • Panels and substrates: Core raw materials for solid-wood and panel furniture, predominantly sourced from panel factories in Guangxi, Fujian, and Shandong
  • Foam-cutting, packaging, and woodworking equipment: Equipment procurement volumes are large; suppliers in Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Jiangsu are the primary vendors
  • Coatings and adhesives: Wood coatings and hot-melt adhesives are consumed in proportion to production scale; small and medium factories are frequent, decentralized buyers

Tianxia Gongchang has catalogued furniture manufacturing factories across all of Zhejiang province — spanning chairs, upholstered sofas, soft beds, solid wood, European-classical, and outdoor segments — complete with company profiles and key-contact information. Upstream sales professionals selling panels, foam, fabric, hardware, wood coatings, or woodworking equipment can search Tianxia Gongchang by Zhejiang × furniture manufacturing to build a qualified factory prospect list, replacing ad-hoc referrals with systematic, targeted outreach.

VIII. Pressures and the Research Institute's Assessment

Zhejiang's furniture industry came under clear pressure in 2023. Above-scale enterprise gross output fell 2.6% year on year, and export delivery value declined 14.1% — reflecting a systemic contraction of global residential furniture demand in a high-interest-rate environment. Vietnam, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian production locations continued to erode price competitiveness in lower-end solid-wood furniture and standardized chair categories.

Yet Zhejiang furniture's structural resilience rests on three durable foundations.

The first is the cost stickiness generated by cluster density. The 1,200-plus enterprises in Anji's chair cluster have built a division of labor so granular that overall supply-chain costs cannot be replicated through labor arbitrage alone. Replicating this ecosystem depth elsewhere would take decades.

The second is export-channel diversification. Companies like Yongyi and Henglin are building DTC cross-border e-commerce channels to run alongside their traditional OEM export businesses, directly reaching end consumers and capturing margins that the wholesale model could never provide.

The third is a partially validated path toward brand premiumization. Kuka Home's acquisition of ROLF BENZ and its partnerships with NATUZZI demonstrate that Zhejiang companies can shift their product mix upmarket — moving from a manufacturing-cost logic to a brand-value logic.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's assessment: Zhejiang furniture manufacturing's trajectory depends on whether the province can layer brand equity and channel pricing power on top of the manufacturing efficiency it has accumulated in its clusters. Anji's OEM experience is the foundation. Kuka Home's brand pathway is the proof of concept. Haining's direct-channel experimentation is the field test. The combined direction of all three will define Zhejiang's position — and its ceiling — in the global home-furnishings manufacturing order.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Zhejiang furniture manufacturer directory and industry data)
  • 2023 Zhejiang Above-Scale Furniture Enterprise Data — Zhejiang Furniture Industry Association (1,161 enterprises, gross output, revenues, export delivery value)
  • Key Data for China's Furniture Industry in 2023 — FurnitureToday (national and Zhejiang above-scale enterprise output comparison)
  • China Furniture Export by Province, Jan–Oct 2023 — Qianzhan Industry Research (Zhejiang USD 15.7 billion, 25.93% national share)
  • One-Third of China's Chairs Come from This Zhejiang County — Sina Finance (Anji chair output share and export share)
  • Can Anji's Chair Industry Find Its Next Growth Engine — Zhejiang Anji Chair Industry Net (Anji 2024 furniture output CNY 39.1 billion, chair sub-sector CNY 31.2 billion)
  • Anji Chair Industry Market Analysis 2022 — Qianzhan (2022 Anji above-scale chair output CNY 26.2 billion)
  • China National Furniture Association — China Chair Capital: Anji (Anji enterprise count, above-scale count, national designation)
  • China National Furniture Association — China Export Sofa Industry Base: Haining (Haining national base designation)
  • Kuka Home 2023 Annual Report — Shanghai Stock Exchange (revenue CNY 19.2 billion, net profit CNY 2.01 billion)
  • Kuka Home Revenue Hits CNY 19.2 Billion Record High — Jiemian News (domestic and overseas revenue breakdown)
  • Henglin 2023 Revenue Up 26% — China Securities Net (Henglin 2023 revenues CNY 8.195 billion)
  • Yongyi Furniture 2023 Annual Report Summary — CNINFO (Yongyi 2023 revenues CNY 3.538 billion, net profit CNY 298 million)
  • Zhejiang and Guangdong Face Headwinds in This Trillion-Yuan Market — Yicai (Zhejiang export decline, Southeast Asia competition context)