You are an executive responsible for unearthing the next new market opportunity for your company and — like your competitors — you're looking at maps of rapidly-growing economies in the emerging world. How would you react to the names Surat, Foshan, and Porto Alegre? With a mystified stare, perhaps? Yet, these three cities each have a population of four million people. Surat is in western India and accounts for about two-fifths of India's textile production. Foshan is China's seventh-largest city in terms of GDP. Porto Alegre is the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, the fourth-largest state in Brazil.
The fact is that medium-sized cities — many of them unknown outside their own countries — are going to be where the next wave of growth is coming from, as discussed in the McKinsey Global Institute report on cities and the rise of the consuming class (pdf). The urban opportunity is truly enormous. The global consuming classes will grow from around 1.2 billion in 1990 to 4.2 billion in 2025 — and 1.2 billion of them will live in only about 440 mostly mid-sized cities in emerging markets. (We define the consuming classes as individuals with more than $10 a day disposable income at purchasing power parity — sufficient incomes to become significant buyers of discretionary good and services.)
To read the full, original article click on this link: Where the Next Wave of Urban Growth Will Come From - Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes - Harvard Business Review
