Consumer China

All work makes defensive plays

  • Published 19 Mar 2009

A search for differentiators in an oversupplied job market is creating surprising buoyancy in some parts of the for-profit education market.

When the chips are down, people tend to fall back upon trusted reflexes. Their responses to adverse economic conditions can have as much to do with culture, society and history as with observable reality. This made us think: perhaps a good way to find reliably defensive investment themes might be to first identify behavioural traits that are hard-wired, or somehow resistant to external shocks. Such traits would be different in different countries at distinct stages of their development, but in China now, they combine to make spending on healthcare (see Personal View), education, e-commerce, social networking, online games, the quality of life and some other areas relatively resistant to the slowdown in growth. Over the next few issues, we plan to concentrate on some of these areas, starting this time with education.

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