China's Upper Crust Ain't Subprime No More

Today's FT has an article by Rapheal Minder entitled, "Increased appetite for borrowing in China." The article is chock full of interesting China statistics culled from a soon to be released McKinsey survey. I will leave it to the marketers to make sense of the numbers, but they must have significance.

Here goes:

-- "31 per cent of affluent people surveyed in mainland China were now interested in borrowing, a “surprising” jump from 19 per cent in 2004, when it [McKinsey] last carried out its Asian personal finance survey."

-- "53 per cent of affluent Chinese are now willing to pay for financial advice, compared with 40 per cent in 2004 and an Asian average of 31 per cent."

-- "McKinsey defines affluent as people on an annual salary of more than $50,000, a segment that is now estimated to cover as many as 2m Chinese but growing at an annual rate of about 15 per cent. Meanwhile, China’s overall bankable population is about 130m households, equivalent to 70 per cent of the country’s urban population."

Kenny Lam, co-author of the survey, sees the results as clearly indicating "the affluent are now willing to do it [borrow money], not just to buy a house but also to make investments and for other things such as education” and “a real cry in the market for true financial planning services”.