Millions & Trillions
One key to business is understanding where your customers are and where they are likely to be. That’s where the Boston Consulting Group’s annual Global Wealth Survey can be useful – if you are selling to the very well-to-do. (Collier’s international retail survey is another avenue to these customers, as I reported last week.)
Where are the customers' yachts?
The world’s wealthy took a hit in 2008, started a recovery in 2009, but BCG sees 2010 as the year their comeback really hits its stride. The report is targeted at wealth managers and measures assets under management in most of the world, but there are some data points that might interest the rest of us. As a group, the rich folk have more money to spend than before, their assets rising 11.5% last year – nearly to pre-recession levels. North America has long been a great market for selling to the rich and still is, registering the highest absolute increase in wealth last year: some $4.6 trillion in loose change. But it was Asia (not including the still suffering Japanese market) that took the growth crown, boosting their wealth by $3.1 trillion, or 22%, in 2009.
2009 closed with 11.2 million “millionaire households” around the globe. The United States had 4.7 million such households in 2009, leading the millionaires of Japan, China, the United Kingdom and Germany. Still, the places to sell to the millionaires may be Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland and the Middle East which have the highest density of millionaires in their populations. (That seems to be reflected in Collier’s retail survey, too.) It makes sense to sell in the great crossroads of the world, which Singapore and Hong Kong have been among for years, recently joined by some Middle Eastern cities. Switzerland, of course, offers decent taxes and the aura of Swiss banking.
Female millionaires are still lagging, women controlling about 27% of the global millionaires’ wealth. The United States is somewhat more enlightened. Women control about a third of America’s millionaire wealth.
