The promise of the New Golden Mountain

Today's guest blogger is Cam Hui. I've known Cam for over thirty years since the time he and my kid brother used to play Stock Ticker together. Cam went on to play real life Stock Ticker in Toronto, Boston and New York. I've been talking to him about how the world's changing dynamic represents a financial opportunity which he is in agreement with. His thoughts come from the hedge fund analyst side of him.

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A century ago, the Chinese looked across the Pacific and called it Golden Mountain – and they came. While the streets weren’t paved with gold, the Chinese and other Asians have largely settled in and succeeded in North America. In effect, they made a Golden Mountain of their own.

Canadian demographic studies are more difficult to obtain, but consider the following from the U.S. Census. Asians males are better educated than any other ethnic group in the United States:



Asians also earn more. The chart below shows that there are more Asian families with income more than $75,000 a year is more than any other ethnic group:



Making our own Golden Mountain
For marketers this has to be an enormously attractive demographic to focus on. Better educated, higher income – what would you pay per set of eyeballs compared to other ethnic demographics?

Consider how others have cashed in on ethnic demographics.

In 2000, Robert Johnson became the first US Black billionaire when he sold Black Entertainment Television (BET) to Viacom for US$4b. In 2006, Univision, the Hispanic media conglomerate, was sold for US$12.6b.



Admittedly, the Asian demographic in the United States is about only one-third the size of the Black or Hispanic population. Nevertheless, there is no home grown North American Asian focused media industry. But as an example of what is possible, Loblaws recently bought T&T Supermarkets for $225 million. The former is a well-established Canadian supermarket chain, while the latter is a chain of Asian focused supermarkets with 17 stores in Canada,

Any entertainment company that can create product that can penetrate this demographic will have created its own Golden Mountain.

In future posts, we will consider how to appeal to the Asian market and how to broaden appeal to the larger North American mainstream.