60 People, 60 Stories

Strength in numbers

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-30 08:26

A total of 55 millionaires are created every day in China, as the nation passed the United Kingdom to rank fourth by millionaire population.

According to consulting firm Capgemini and Merrill Lynch's World Wealth Report issued in June, the rising Asian power had 364,000 millionaires at the end of last year, compared with 413,000 the previous year, or a drop of 11.8 percent, due to the financial turmoil and economic downturn.

Yet the ranks of the rich have not been thinned as much as elsewhere in the world.

The report said the world's population of high net worth individuals, or persons with investible assets of at least $1 million, had dropped 14.9 percent from the year before, while their aggregate wealth fell by 19.5 percent.

China now only ranks after the United States, Japan and Germany in its number of millionaires and the Chinese wealth machine has not hit the brakes.

To be sure, China's millionaire count still lags behind those of many other countries on a per capita basis.

And even in absolute terms, China has less than half the number of millionaires than Germany.

However, the report stresses that private consumption in China "seems to have had a more significant contribution than in the US, with a rise in car and housing sales suggesting increased confidence in the domestic Chinese economy".

Chief economists at China's National Bureau of Statistics said the nation's economy will be able to achieve the target of 8 percent GDP growth this year set by the central government, although there are still difficulties ahead.

China Daily