German industrial conglomerate ThyssenKrupp expects to maintain its average annual sales growth rate of roughly 10 percent in China over the next three to five years, its China chief said at the Reuters China Century Summit.

Sales in China, its largest market in Asia, are estimated to top 1 billion euros ($1.36 billion) in the current fiscal year, up from 955 million euros a year earlier, Alfred Wewers, president and chief executive officer of ThyssenKrupp’s China operations.

Buyout firm MBK Partners sees ample investment opportunities in domestically focused Chinese consumer and industrial firms as the world’s fourth-biggest economy gets richer, Kuo-Chuan Kung, MBK Partners’ head for Greater China, said at the Reuters China Century Summit.

But asset prices are also expected to rise amid fierce competition and a soaring local stock market, he added.

North Asia-focused MBK also expects more private equity-invested companies to exit through IPOs on China’s surging local bourses as Beijing looks to mop up excess market liquidity.

Click below to hear Kung’s views on the changing nature of foreign capital flows into China:

http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters/editorial/images/20070904/MBK.mp3

Starbucks Corp, the world’s biggest coffee-shop chain, plans to source coffee from China for the first time as it expands in a country with more than 5,000 years of tea-drinking culture, its country head said at the Reuters China Century Summit.

Starbucks has been working with coffee farmers in China’s southwest to help them meet sourcing standards and has sent coffee shipments to the United States for testing, Starbucks, China President Wang Jinlong said.

Click below to hear Wang’s views on how China’s economic growth is changing consumer tastes:

http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters/editorial/images/20070904/starbucks.mp3

While a mortgage default crisis in the United States provoked a credit crunch and threatens to hurt global economic growth, Chinese stocks have surged. So Howard Wang counts himself as relatively fortunate to be JF Asset Management’s top China fund manager. The MSCI China index has risen more than 40 percent this year, and Wang believes it will rise another 10 percent by the end of December. Wang, who is co-manager of the $744.6 million JF Greater China fund, is upbeat on companies profiting from surging consumer spending, such as retailers, and anything linked with inflation — property firms and insurers. He’s not so keen on telecoms and oil stocks. The risks? Any global slowdown — Wang believes a U.S. interest rate cut by a Federal Reserve chairman tasked with controlling inflation would send a signal that bad times really do lie ahead. Taiwan’s export driven economy would be particularly vulnerable. In mainland China, a domestic danger lurks in the guise of inflation, thanks to climbing food prices. 

To listen to Howard Wang, click here.

As China increasingly creaks open the door for domestic investors to invest overseas, HSBC Holdings’s Chinese fund management joint venture aims to launch a life cycle fund this year to raise up to 10 billion yuan ($1.33 billion), CEO Steve Lee said at the Reuters China Century Summit.

HSBC Jintrust also plans to launch a fund in May of next year to invest client money in overseas financial markets under China’s QDII scheme, Lee said.

Chinese fund management companies, brokerages and banks are rushing to launch Qualified Domestic Investor Scheme (QDII) funds — a national scheme aimed at easing upward pressure on the country’s currency and broadening investment choices for domestic investors.

Click here to hear Lee’s views on China’s fledgling bond market and what it needs to develop:

http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters/editorial/images/20070904/HSBC.mp3

A growing taste for healthy drinks among China’s increasingly affluent consumers is expected to help boost China Huiyuan Juice Group’s revenue five-fold in the next three to five years, Vice President Matthew Gene Mouw said at the Reuters China Century Summit.

China’s largest maker of pure juice drinks aims to grow sales to 10 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in the period from 2 billion yuan last year, in a market growing 10 percent a year and crowded with the likes of Tingyi and Coca-Cola.

Click here to hear Mouw on the main growth drivers in China’s juice market:

http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters/editorial/images/20070904/HSBC.mp3

Demand for wealth management services is soaring in China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, and Bank of East Asia (China) is finding ways to tap that growth, vice president Lam Chi Man told the Reuters China Century Summit.

Bank of East Asia — Hong Kong’s fifth-largest lender by assets — is seeking approval to allow its clients in mainland China to invest directly in Hong Kong stocks, Lam said.

China’s Growing Middle Class 

By Jerold Friedland, Professor of Law and Director of the Asian Legal Studies Program at DePaul University in Chicago.
 
Reuter’s interviews with top executives at Tsingtao Brewery and Gome Electrical Appliances suggest that Chinese firms expect China’s growing middle class to provide an expanding market for their upscale products.   Currently, the middle class is estimated to include between 11 and 19 percent of China’s 1.3 billion population.  At current rates of economic growth, China’s middle class could encompass 25 percent of the population by 2010,  and 40 percent by 2020. 
    
Political correctness compels many Chinese to avoid the term “middle class”, substituting “middle stratum” or “middle-income group.” Generally, these terms refer to people whose incomes allow them to afford items such as a house, car, child education and family vacation.  This lifestyle usually requires annual household income of about 75,000 RMB ($9,000), and asset ownership of over 500,000 RMB ($60,000).  The group includes most managers, professionals, skilled technicians and service workers.
    
A substantial increase in consumption by China’s middle class will not occur, however, until its saving and spending patterns change.  Despite the rapid growth of China’s economy, its domestic consumption rate is far below the world average.  Consumption is low because savings rates in China are very high, reflecting the population’s deep-seated concerns about retirement and health care costs. These concerns will abate only gradually as China’s social safety net improves.  If the savings rate decreases, China’s domestic consumption rate can increase to 65 percent by 2010 and 71 percent by 2020, close to the 78 percent rate in most developed countries.
    
The growth of China’s middle class also may lead to significant social and political change.  The current extreme income disparity between rich and poor in China has created severe social friction, particularly in rural areas.  This tension may ease as a larger portion of China’s population enters the middle class.  This has been the case in most advanced economies, where the middle class is an important stabilizing force that adheres to a moderate ideology.
    
It is doubtful, however, that China’s middle class will demand major political reforms.   Although it is possible that a rising Chinese middle class will demand democratization and liberalization, the current group appears to seek little more than economic security. Indeed, many in China’s educated middle class are elitists who disdain the rural peasantry.  Rapid democratization, they fear, would allow corrupt officials and demagogues to manipulate a huge peasant population that is not ready to participate in elections.  Although China’s middle class may become the western-style consumers that business leaders hope for, it will not press for political change as long as its economic status is not threatened.  
– Prof. Friedland specializes in the areas of international business and taxation and is a well-known expert on joint ventures, partnerships and limit liability companies. Professor Friedland has lived and worked in China, serving as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Beijing and lecturing at universities and bar associations throughout the country.