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Nno other relatively homogenous market even comes close to US market size. The EU is great, a lot of regulations have been standardised, but it's still a place with 24 different languages, twelve different currencies, different national systems (e.g. payment systems, shipping, retail outlets, marketing channels), culture etc. It's still very much a fragmented place. So the UK, France, Germany, Italy are still to a substantial extent separate markets, all of which are less than a quarter the size of the US. Japan probably comes closest to the US. Then there's China, it has the gdp, but not the gdp per capita. You can take $50 a day as a threshold for the type of targeted consumer class for example, that's about $18k a year. If you look at income distributions in China you'll find only about 10 million Chinese qualify. If you take a $20 a day / $7k a year figure, you get to about 100 million people. Japan is similar, around 100m. The US figure for this group is 300 million. I mean don't get me wrong, you can't only have a US-focus. But I hardly see any companies do that. Instead they do first-launches in key markets and expand later on, and that makes sense. Some data from Pew: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ |