Nobody wants to be excluded from the world’s largest market. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
China may be a closed, authoritarian, militant, “reverse-engineering” society. But even more importantly, China has the world’s largest consumer army, and that – more than anything else – is why China is feared by countless corporations around the globe, all of whom desperately seek access to this army of rabid buyers.
For the latest example of that look no further than the plunge in H&M shares, which fell as much as 3.1% in Stockholm, while Nike dropped 3.6% in U.S. premarket trading, with the brands facing possible boycotts in China over their stance on using cotton sourced from the contentious Xinjiang region.
As Reuters reports, Nike and Adidas came under fire on Chinese social media on Thursday after Beijing’s propaganda offensive against Swedish fashion brand H&M sparked by the company’s expression of concern about labor conditions in Xinjiang. The sportswear companies were the latest to be caught up in a backlash prompted by a government call to stop foreign brands from tainting China’s name as internet users found statements they had made in the past on Xinjiang.
