More rich in China by 2015

The global economic recession is forcing the rich in China to scale down their spending on luxury goods, but it cannot hold back the rapid growth of wealthy households, according to a report released on Friday by global management consultancy McKinsey & Company.
China is expected to be the world's fourth largest country with wealthy households by 2015, after the US, Japan and the UK.
The nation is expected to have more than 4 million wealthy households by then, the report said.
The time is right for international luxury companies to invest in China and cash in on the tremendous opportunities over the next five to seven years, despite the negative short-term impact of the financial crisis, the report said.
The McKinsey research was conducted in the last quarter of 2008 and was based on face-to-face interviews with 1,750 wealthy households from China's 16 cities. The wealthy households, as McKinsey identifies, refer to those having an annual income in excess of 250,000 yuan.
By the end of last year, there were 1.6 million wealthy households nationwide, accounting for less than 1 per cent of the total, but the tally will increase by 16 per cent annually.
The most striking finding, according to McKinsey, is that the Chinese wealthy are much younger than those from the US and Japan.