carstenw Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Frog, there are so many articles around, written from a very wide varieties of points of view (and agendas) that it is almost impossible to find "the truth", and I am naturally very skeptical of many claims, not only about China, but about the world in general. There are simply many truths out there, many of which are mutually incompatible. Here is for example an article which paints a very dim picture of real estate in China for the middle class:
http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat11/sub71/item1822.html
More to my point is that what goes for middle class in China doesn't even reach the poverty line in many European countries, yet cameras are priced very similarly, leading to an obvious problem in affordability, relatively speaking. Please examine the following numbers, and realise that in spite of the similar costs, a Berlin middle class family has a disposable income on the order of several times that of a Chinese middle class family. How can this middle class segment be a huge potential source of camera sales? I don't see it.
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Germany&country2=China&city1=Berlin&city2=Shanghai
My theory is that the large number of camera sales so far has not been made by middle class Chinese families, but by upper middle class and "affluent" Chinese buyers, whose numbers are dramatically smaller than mere middle class families. The "Affluent" number 3% of the population, and start at $34000/year, according to one site I read, and the current upper middle class segment in China is also not large. The lower middle class tops out at $16000/year, and figuring rent and food costs, doesn't provide a lot of extra money for fancy cameras every few years.
Not only that, but the upcoming financial pressures on such families in China look dramatic compared to the projected future growth. China is quite simply getting more expensive at a pace significantly outpacing the income growth of a specific family. In other words, the definition of "middle class" may have to be revised many times in the coming years, as people expect higher quality of living (read: better hospitals, education, cleaner air, safer work conditions, more equality, more democracy, etc.), and more and more move to urban areas, and the net effect may well be that the number of middle class families by the definition of the day will level off and even start to decrease, as the wealth concentrates more and more among the ultra-rich.
I don't see the continued high sales and growth in China for the future that we have seen so far, at least not for long.
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