Why the iPhone look like an iPhone
By 2030, China and India will be the largest consumer markets. There are other ways in which the growing middle-class markets globally are changing how technological competition takes place. In the United States, a patent confers an exclusive right of use for twenty years. For decades, the U.S patent and Trademark Office has been the world’s most important agency when it comes to protecting inventions, and it will likely continue to be for some time. But while in 2016 the number of patent applications filed in the United States was three times greater than in 1995, in India it was seven times greater, and in China a whopping seventy-two times greater. As China and India grow in prominence, so does their culture of patenting new products and inventions.
A clash of the middle classes?
The clash from emerging markets is growing bigger and bigger by the day, while those from Europe and the United States are downsizing — with some notable exceptions, such as tech. But even in the tech sector, Chinese and Indian companies are becoming larger not only because of the size of the population they serve but also because more people are online and using digital services. The truth is that there are more broadband, social media, and mobile payment users in China or India than in the United States. This gap will only continue to widen.
More broadly, if a company has been successful with the old middle class, there’s no guarantee it will be equally successful with the new middle class: For example, eBay has consistently underperformed TaoBao in China because it failed to recognize that Chinese consumers prefer interacting directly with suppliers and care little about a rating system. Also, the younger generation of consumers isn’t saving as much as its parents and grandparents used to.
Chinese young consumers are starting to behave as if they were Americans, a development that undermines the cozy arrangement whereby Chinese people saved while Americans spent. As of 2020, the proportion of Chinese household debt to GDP hovered at around 50 percent, compared to 76 percent in the United States. By 2030, both countries could be at the same level. Americans will need to tighten their belts if China’s younger generation no longer does their saving for them.
2030 by Mauro.F.Guillen: 82–87
