China’s Millionaires Jump Past 1 Million on Savings, Growth
By Frederik Balfour - May 31, 2011
China has more than a million millionaires as economic growth, savings and a strengthening currency helped swell their ranks by 262,000 last year, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey.
Millionaire households jumped 31 percent in 2010 from the previous year to 1.11 million, the BCG Global Wealth Survey released today showed.
China’s number of millionaire households ranks it third behind the 5.22 million in the U.S. and Japan’s 1.53 million, according to BCG. Still, wealth in privately held businesses and property wasn’t accounted for in the survey, thereby missing a major chunk of economic assets in the mainland.
“This grossly underestimates true overall wealth in China,” said Tjun Tang, a partner at BCG in Hong Kong and one of the report’s authors. The survey also excludes works of art, fine wines and yachts, a growing class of assets among China’s well-heeled.
China ranks eighth globally for households with assets worth more than $100 million, according to the survey.
The Asian nation’s affluent class only holds about 5 percent of its wealth offshore, said Tang, and international wealth management companies are constrained by the number of products they can offer inside China.
bloomberg.com
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