Blog: Chinese explosion

Catherine Sleep | 5 January 2006

Did you see our report that 70,000 supermarkets had opened in rural China last year? That’s a breathtaking number, and the government hopes to increase it to 250,000 in the next three years.

As an independent traveller I’m thinking “Yikes! Better get over to China before it’s ruined.” But as a retailer I’d be thinking “I want me a piece of that”, and as a manufacturer of branded goods I’d be seeing an unprecedented wealth of opportunities to place my product.

I think we can confidently predict there’ll be a marked uptake in Mandarin courses at business schools this year.