China: The Next Great MR Growth Market?

As anyone who has decided to invest in China will tell you, it’s not about what China has achieved to date but what it is going to become. And this is not restricted to selling cars, coal and mobiles (well…maybe it is a bit!); MR gets a major boost from this growth! An opportunity amongst opportunities – nations within a nation: “China”. I see more and more people coming and joining the growth story as it’s hard to see this pace anywhere else (except India – though let’s stick to China for now!).

Let me share some key stats on MR in China :

• China’s MR Market size is around 1 billion dollars, while the Global MR market is 30 billion US Dollars, China is still ranked a respectable 6^th.
• Our “big brother”, the Advertising market has China sitting pretty at No. 2 with 57 billion USD.

Clearly MR is the “little brother” of the Advertising market. In fact if we look at the global MR industry – it is about half the size of China’s advertising market alone! The good news is as the smaller sibling we rarely march to our own tune, but follow in big brother’s footsteps. So expect to see China to break into the top 3 MR markets within the next 3 years and the 2^nd within 5-7 years.

So if MR follows Advertising trends, what’s the potential MR market size in China? If we look at the top 5 mature (almost sounds like a bad thing these days) MR markets ahead of China (i.e. USA, UK, Germany, France & Japan), are 9.5% on average of the total Advertising market size in these markets. And in China today – MR is a mere 1.6% of the Advertising market size. Even if China achieves an average half of these markets, the potential upside is 300%.

Often when I talk China and numbers there is a lot of skepticism and an expectation that a bubble is coming. Well waiting in our own holes hoping China’s hole is potentially larger doesn’t seem like a great strategy to me. My advice will be to get in there and join the party while you can. If you are right about the bubble, when or if it does burst you would have had a good run for a while (probably quite a while). Personally I think this run is here to stay, but who knows what tomorrow brings?

What I think we can agree on is that at least for the foreseeable future, China is the next great growth market for market research suppliers. What are you waiting on?