Crossing the River by Feeling for Stones: A New Approach to Exporting Creative Content to China?
on June 1, 2012
We have all heard the statistics. About how China is forecast to overtake the U.S. to be the largest economy in the world by 2027. How China already has 277 million mobile web users, of which 45 percent use their handsets to access music and 21 per cent video games. How more than 300 million Chinese are studying English. How Chinese e–commerce is predicted to triple by 2015, when sales could hit $420 billion—20 percent higher than the projection for the U.S. market. And how, at 67,300, China sends more students to U.K. universities than any other country in the world. These dizzying numbers should mean there is a particularly large market for the U.K.’s creative industries, right? The trade statistics suggest not. According to UNCTAD, in 2010 the U.K.’s share of creative goods exports to China was just 1.4 percent, compared with a 4.8 percent share in world creative goods exports. U.K. exports of creative goods to China totaled $140 million, lower than not only Japan ($900 million), the U.S. ($800 million), and Singapore ($520 million), but also France ($224 million), Germany ($325 million), and Italy ($474 million). With the exception of Japan and Germany, the value of U.K. exports of creative goods grew at a slower rate than in all these countries between 2002 and 2010. These trade statistics are not without their problems—they exclude all creative services, for example—nonetheless they indicate that the U.K.’s creative industries are punching below their weight in Chinese markets.
