Designing for CH-CH-CH-CHINA...

Well it goes a'lil something like this...

Over the next 15-20 years more people will migrate to China’s cities for higher paying jobs. These working consumers once the country’s poorest will steadily climb the income ladder, creating a new and massive middle class. By around 2011 the lower middle class will number some 290 million people representing 44% or the urban population. A second transition is projected to occur in the following decade when hundreds of millions will join the upper middle class. By 2025 this segment will comprise of 520 million people – more than half the expected urban population of China.

The second biggest IKEA store in the world after the Stockholm flagship store is in Beijing, China. IKEA like other furniture and furnishing retailers is hoping to cash in on the millions of new home buyers and they stand to profit from twin trends in China, both government-supported - millions of families buying new homes and, official efforts to drive economic growth by boosting consumer spending. IKEA, which in addition to the Beijing and Shanghai outlets has a store in the southern city of Guangzhou, plans to have a total of 10 stores within five years, including expansion to the country's west with an outlet being built in the city of Chengdu.

The government started the trend moving in the late 1990s when, hoping to get state companies out of the business of housing their workers, it prodded families to buy homes, offering low-cost mortgages or bargain prices on older apartments. Coupled with rising urban incomes, that set off a building boom in the late 1990s in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, with developers putting up forests of high-rises with thousands of new apartments. Decorating a home has become a cultural phenomenon, driving the creation of the career of Chinese interior designer and a crop of home-decor magazines with the latest in European design. Estimates of the size of China's home improvement market range from $15 billion to as much as $40 billion, with growth forecast at 10 to 20 percent a year. The government says overall retail sales rose nearly 13 percent in 2005.