Onward and upward
Sao Paulo (Photo by andredeak via Flickr)
As I was leafing through the FT, I came upon an amazing photo of two soaring towers in Shanghai. In the foreground was a construction site. The photo was sexy enough to lure me into reading the paper’s mining-industry analysis.
Mining! What was I thinking? Well, it was all worth it for this one little nugget – buried under reams of text about copper prices and the stockpiling of zinc by China:
Rio Tinto, the multinational miner, reminded investors of these fundamentals … . The urbanisation rate of the Chinese population is still only 45 percent, and that is not even mentioning India or Brazil — “50,000 new skyscrapers are needed by 2025″, it adds.
Really? Fifty thousand skyscrapers in the next 15+ years? That’s about 3,300 per year, or 63 a week or nine a day for 15 years!
OK. So I have no idea how Rio Tinto built its projection. For instance, how do they define what qualifies as a “skyscraper.” And I also don’t know how many skyscrapers have been built, on average, each year over the last 15 or 20 years. Maybe Rio’s number is not so amazing.
On the face of it, though, it’s kind of mind boggling.