It seems wine is becoming more popular in China:
More and more Chinese drink wines, because it’s fashionable and a kind of social status,” said Zhou Ning, market strategy manager of a Beijing-based real estate company whose ads often feature young couples drinking wine or beautiful women lounging with a glass of wine. “We include wine in our ads because we want to tell potential customers that people living in our apartments are elegant and cultivated, and they pay attention to quality of life.”
This country has a growing urban middle class; experts estimate that roughly 500,000 Chinese earn as much as $64,000 a year, though exact figures are hard to come by. Meanwhile, the tastes of the newly affluent in Beijing and Shanghai have driven sales of a wide variety of luxury items.
Citing data from China’s customs bureau, the Shanghai Daily newspaper recently reported that wine imports surged by 91 percent in the first nine months of 2006. According to industry experts at a conference in Beijing this month, consumption of wine rose 13 percent between 2004 and 2005, to about 564 million bottles.
At that rate, China could go a long way toward making the worldwide wine industry even bigger.
It’ll be interesting to see if this wine trend has an impact on the beauty care market in China as it has here in the US and Europe. Everyone’s throwing grape seed antioxidants into hair and skincare products even those there’s little documented benefit. I wonder if the Chinese market will fall for that?
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