Thailand might never be the new China, but it’s an emerging market that’s poised for a luxury boom, according to Ledbury Research.
In its latest Luxury Market Insights report, to be published later this week, Ledbury singled out Thailand as the number-one hot spot, or emerging market for luxury goods.
The country has a gross domestic product of nearly $346 billion – the largest in Southeast Asia after Indonesia – an unemployment rate of less than one percent, and a flourishing export and tourism industry.
It has another crucial factor in its favour: a middle class.
“Southeast Asia overall is quite far behind China, the size of the population doesn’t compare and you won’t see the same explosion in luxury consumption. What Thailand has is domestic demand from a big middle class, and there is not a large income inequality in the country,” said Nicola Ko, luxury analyst at Ledbury who helped to research and write the report.