News Summary

• Consumer spending as a percentage of GDP is less than 50%, far below its approximately two-thirds share in the United States.
• That increasingly means businesses should look to consumer outlays on services rather than finished goods.
• “Tremendous opportunities are here for Western companies’ looking into service areas,” says John Quelch, executive vice chancellor at Duke Kunshan University in China.
• ‘We do see young people in China gravitating their consumption towards more emotion-generating experiences, as opposed to putting their funds into material goods expenditures,’ he says.