China's wealthy households number to rank world 4th by 2015

Despite the global recession, China will have over four million rich households earning more than USD 36,574 dollars annually by 2015, making it the world's fourth largest nation in terms of the number of wealthy families, an industry report said on Thursday.

China, the world's most populous nation, is expected to have more than four million wealthy households by 2015, making it the world's fourth-largest country in terms of the number of wealthy families, trailing the US, Japan and Britain, a research report released by McKinsey & Company said.

The number of wealthy households whose annual income exceed 250,000 yuan (USD 36,574) living in urban areas topped 1.6 million last year, it said. While the wealthy currently accounted for less than one per cent of urban Chinese households, the number is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15.9 per cent in next five to seven years, said the report.

The wealthy in China were concentrated in the country's more prosperous eastern and southern regions, with around 30 per cent of the wealthy families living in China's four
largest metropolitans -- Beijing, eastern Shanghai, southern Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the official Xinhua news agency reported. 

Vinay Dixit, director of McKinsey's Asia Consumer Centers, said the current global economic slowdown would affect the spending of even the rich, but that did not lower
the importance of China's wealthy consumers to manufacturers, retailers and service providers in many sectors. 

The report also showed that most affluent Chinese consumers were younger than their global peers. On average, wealthy consumers in China were 20 years younger than those in the United States and Japan. About 80 per cent of those were under 45 in China, compared with 30 per cent in the United States and 19 per cent in Japan.