If you read the news today, you will see Chinese consumers are really dominating the headlines.
- Recently they were talking about Hong Kong billionaire, Ronnie Chan, who donated $350 million to Harvard. It’s the single largest donation to Harvard Business School, ever. He gets his wealth from Hang Lung Group which he owns. Hang Lung Group has the largest luxury shopping center in Shanghai, among many, many other real estate holdings.
- In April this year, a Chinese collector paid a record $36 million to buy an ancient Chinese ceramic cup at auction from Sotheby’s, Hong Kong. Mr. Liu, who is the number one Chinese collector of art, not only bought this expensive artifact, but the story is, he paid for the cup with his American Express card. Have you ever heard of anybody who buys $36 million in one purchase on American Express? (We should mention that this humongous purchase coincidentally earned him 421,860,000 American Express points. That’s about about 28 million frequent flier miles.)
- The Alibaba initial public offering (IPO) is the perfect manifestation of the power and influence of China’s super consumers. Alibaba is roughly about twice the size of Amazon and three times the size of eBay. It just happened that our book, China’s Super Consumers: What 1 Billion Customers Want and How to Sell it to Them was released in the same month as the Alibaba IPO. It’s almost like we are doing it in tandem, but it’s not planned, just a lucky coincidence. I think the IPO will put Alibaba front and center on the world stage.
Blog by Savio Chan 