The Power Of Slow Change: The Rise Of Asian Consumers (Beer Drinkers)

China’s and the emerging market story can be seen in many aspects.

And part of these story that we seem to be seeing is the empowerment of Asian Consumers as signified by the surge in beer economics.

This from the Economist,

CHINA'S remarkable growth is as apparent in beer consumption as it is in more formal economic indicators. In the space of a couple of decades the country has gone from barely touching a drop to become the world's biggest beer market, a considerable distance ahead of America. And beer drinking in China is growing fast, by nearly 10% a year according to Credit Suisse's World Map of Beer. This might seem like good news for the four big firms that dominate global brewing. Between them ABI, SABMiller, Carlsberg and Heineken have nearly half the world market. But unlike America and other hugely profitable mature markets where beer drinking has levelled off or is in decline, China's drinkers provide slender profits. Still it remains a market with huge potential, though foreign brewers must now be rather tired of hearing that.

Trends like this are easy spot once you open your mind, but for many these changes would seem hard to grasp.

Nevertheless there are many possible ramifications here: some that come to my mind is that they provide windows of opportunity for investments, they give an insight on how many people in Asia are spending their money (cultural shift), they also reveal changes in trends that also have geopolitical and domestic political and economic implications and etc...

Interesting.