China’s 400 million millennials—a population five times greater than that of the United States—have proven themselves the most powerful contingent in the Chinese marketplace, which, with the help of the Middle Kingdom’s youngest consumers’ taste for premium quality, is poised to overtake America by 2028. Millennials are not only helping to grow the Chinese economy—they’re also redefining how it looks, and for whom. National firms must now clamber for hard-won millennial Yuan alongside steely foreign veterans, and go for the necks of their Chinese competitors. To do this, it is imperative to get to know the Chinese millennial of 2017.
Digital natives in China made up 73 percent of all e-commerce users nationwide in 2015, and nearly the same proportion of millennials reported shopping on their phones, generating 506 billion USD in revenue from mobile purchases alone. Young Chinese consumers’ familiarity with the user experiences afforded by mobile shopping services and social media applications means they demand a comparable degree of individualization and convenience from brick-and-mortar venues, where they prefer to “experience” products, before making a purchase via cell phone. Last year, millennials shelled out 5.5 trillion USD via third party mobile payment platforms like Alipay, Tenpay and QQ Wallet. Analysts predict that China’s mobile payment market could grow by a factor of 7.4 in 2017, demonstrating how the millennial narrative—busy, cosmopolitan and aspirational—now drives the market.
Yet millennials are not spendthrifts. 61 percent of millennials live with their parents (dramatically lowering individual living costs), and save 22 percent of their income annually, compared to their American peers’ savings of just 7.5 percent.
Food, clothes, digital products, and entertainment comprise the greatest shares of millennial spending. Millennials have also developed quite a taste for retailtainment and international travel, trends that, combined, make sense of millennials’ willingness to spend 14,000 USD on a year’s worth of travel.
The keystone demographic of the Chinese economy, Millennials represent a third of the country’s population, spend to reflect their lifestyle, itself a product of rapid economic growth whose windfalls have landed overwhelmingly in urban centers and since transformed the face of the Chinese consumer.
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