Numbers in China can be, well, flexible. A revision of the way it calculates its GDP last year added over $300,000,000 to the figure for 2004, still a fair piece of change. Still, a few numbers published recently have been of particular interest.
1) China’s trade surplus hit 177.47 billion US dollars in 2006, the government said, up about a quarter from the previous year…….
2) The total value of shares on Chinese stock exchanges hit one trillion dollars in the last couple of days. ‘That’s triple the figure 18 months ago….
and 3) The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said total vehicle sales rose 25 pc last year to 7.2 million. That makes China the number 2 world market after the U.S. (16.5 million). China beat out Japan (5.7 million) to take the number two spot. Car purchases in the U.S. and Japan are pretty well flat. But China’s swelling middle classes want their cars just like everybody else.And if numbers one and two above continue to rise, so will the car buying frenzy. At that rate (and, of course, there are a lot of ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’ in that projection, but bear with me),
it’ll be what, ten or fewer years before it overtakes the U.S.? What about fifteen years or twenty years? 30 million new cars a year? Forty million? Scary stuff.
SDBE