If you are not rich enough, you cannot buy things from my shop

If you are opening a shop which only welcome people who have spent HK$3 million in your shops elsewhere, you are not really opening a shop. Wall Street Journal reported that Chow Tai Fook opened a shop in Beijing, but it is only opened to someone who has spent HK$3 million or more this year. This exclusive shop will cater for rich folks who enjoy more privacy in buying stuff. They dubbed the acronym VVIP (very very important people) for these people who can access the shop.

The stories of Chinese rich folks buying stuff every where are not uncommon these days, and they are very big spender indeed. It is not that China is getting really super rich overall, rather because China has awful lot of people, so a tiny fraction of rich people are enough to buy up all Gucci or Louis Vuitton bags in their stores in Tsim Sha Tsui of Hong Kong, and honestly you might be surprised to see Gucci and Louis Vuitton in second-tier cities like Shenyang, with their GDP per capita just roughly one third of Hong Kong.

There is certainly a divergence between the super upper class and the mass. Despite the apparent willingness to spend for these VVIPs, in a statistics I cited earlier, Chinese people are not extremely willing to spend. After all, majority of Chinese people are still pretty poor, let’s face it. Yes, China has the potential to be a large consumption country, but before that happened, there will be a long process of restructuring the economy, which is going pretty slowly.

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About Zarathustra

Zarathustra: Founder and Managing Editor of Also sprach Analyst. Once an analyst, now an investor and entrepreneur. Based in Hong Kong, but Londoner at heart.