Dan Harris

Luxury Products in China

What you are ignoring here though is that to be a super luxury, it almost has to not be available in China. I lived in Turkey for a year and some of the super-rich Turks would brag to me about how they would go to Paris to purchase their American toothpaste. They would do this even though the very same toothpaste was available in Turkey, but also made there. They would do this because it was the going to Paris that made the toothpaste so elite, not the toothpaste itself. The ultra-ultra rich American yacht buyer would not be caught dead buying anything in the US for the same reason -- Italy is the place.

I suspect that is the role HK plays for the ultra-rich Chinese today.

To badly paraphrase Groucho Marx, the risk luxury goods makers face by going into China is that the ultra-rich Chinese would not want to buy from any such producer that would have China as a member.