It isn’t breaking news that China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, along with a slew of other countries in Eastern and Southern Asia, are important players in the global economy. In fact, it isn’t news at all. What is potential news, is that breweries are becoming a larger part of what is a shift in the global market in regard to consumer goods as a whole.

It would be a stretch to claim that beer is popular in China. But it doesn’t change the fact that China is the world’s number one consumer of the bubbly libation we hold so dear to our hearts. Jørgen Buhl Rasmussen, CEO of Carlsberg Group(the world’s 4^th largest brewing group), reported on Carslberg Group’s growth, “You are probably looking somewhere between 60% to 80% of the global volume growth will come from Asia and a big part of that will come from China”.

"Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and an iPhone" -Confucius (probably)

The sheer volume of beer consumed in China outweighs countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany who consume beer at a much higher rate per capita but simply don’t have as many consumers. However, brewing groups like Carlsberg who already produce their beer in China, have yet to see outstanding profit margins due to consumers’ unwillingness to pay top dollar for beer. So far. Nevertheless companies are still willing to invest large sums of money to the beer in China, as they feel this attitude is slowly but surely to change in the near future.

China, doing its best impersonation of the United States in the 1950s, has a middle class obsessed with status. This means cars, iPhones, fancy high rise apartments, foreign cigarettes, and possibly beer in the future, can all be bought at premium prices for no reason other than to show that the person who has them, can indeed afford them.

Companies like Carlsberg Group are well aware of China’s love for the gaudy and they know that beer is simply the next Christian Dior handbag (metaphorically, of course). Companies who market their products as semi-luxury items understand full well that raising the price of an item, can make it a lot more attractive to a consumer who wants to buy a product simply to show off the size of their wallet.

It may be a sad state of affairs when working class people save up money for months so that when their friends and relatives come to visit their home, they can greet them in their Nike sneakers and serve them Carlsberg. But who is to blame? If a consumer is unwilling to purchase a particular item because it’s associated with peasantry, the company adjusts. They change their ad campaigns. They turn coal dust to diamond dust, and suddenly they can’t keep the product on the shelves. The Chinese have money and want to spend it. Who are we to deny them?

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