Chinese Women Go Shopping

Shoppers throughout the West, wary of a double-dip recession, are still pinching their pennies. But Chinese consumers are opening their wallets—big time. According to McKinsey, retail sales in China have grown by 25 percent annually from 2007 to 2009, making the Chinese consumer sector arguably the healthiest of any major economy in the world, says Yuval Atsmon, a consultant in McKinsey’s Shanghai office. Consumer confidence is now at its highest point since 2007. And female shoppers are leading the way: last year Chinese women saved just 24 percent of their income, compared with 55 percent in 2006, according to a recent study in Women of China magazine. What’s more, three quarters of Chinese women say that they’re the ones who control the family purse strings, according to a 2010 MasterCard report. That’s up slightly from last year, and is 7 percentage points higher than the number of men who say they make household spending decisions. That means the nation’s 650 million women are an “emerging powerhouse within the powerhouse” of China, according to Georgette Tan, a Master-Card vice president.

For Western companies, the rise of the female consumer in China is a welcome change. For years, multinationals ignored Chinese women because their contribution to household income was so small—a fact “that’s changed dramatically,” says Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group. In the 1950s women contributed just 20 percent of household income. That rose to about 40 percent in the 1990s and then reached 50 percent last year, according to Rein.