The wild, wild east

The country’s middle class is growing explosively (see chart). In 2010 mainstream consumers—those with enough money to buy cars, fridges and phones but not Rolls-Royces—made up less than a tenth of urban households. In a new forecast, McKinsey predicts that by 2020 they will make up well over half. BCG reckons that urban private consumption will rise from $3.2 trillion today to $5.6 trillion in 2020.

A big winner has been China’s e-commerce, a market that is now larger than America’s.
Outside the big cities bricks-and-mortar stores are thinner on the ground, so online shopping is becoming increasingly important. Even where shops are readily accessible, consumers often go “showrooming”, looking at goods in physical outlets but buying them more cheaply online. This is happening the world over, but in China the trend has been accentuated by the ubiquity of smartphones, the reliability of online-payment systems and the spread of same-day delivery services.
Thanks to the convergence of mobile commerce and social media, observes Miles Young, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm, China is the world’s epicentre of “social commerce”. Studies by BCG show that Chinese consumers are much more likely than American or European ones to interact with brands through social media.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21663328-booming-middle-class-creating-worlds-most-dynamic-consumer-market-wild-wild