Jeff Walters
Managing Director & Senior Partner
Hong Kong
Jeff Walters is the leader of Boston Consulting Group’s Marketing, Sales & Pricing practice in Asia Pacific, the co-leader of BCG GAMMA in Greater China, and the leader of BCG's China Center for Customer Insight, which builds proprietary insights, data and methodologies for understanding China's consumers. He is also a co-leader of the go-to-market in emerging markets topic for BCG, a member of the leadership team of the firm’s Consumer practice in China, and a core member of Global Advantage practice.
Since joining BCG in 2003, Jeff has worked extensively in strategy development and operations for consumer goods companies and retailers, particularly in home appliances, spirits, sportswear apparel, consumer electronics, food, luxury goods, and beverages. He has deep experience in the evolving consumer landscape in China, including consumer consumption patterns, the geographic distribution of China's growing middle class, online behavior, and the growth of e-commerce.
Jeff has led multiple client engagements in China on issues related to growth strategy, mergers and acquisitions, new category entry, e-commerce, organization design, sourcing optimization, geographic expansion, brand repositioning, retail format design, retail footprint planning, and retail assortment planning. Jeff also has specific expertise in retail inventory management, including experience designing the replenishment algorithms for one of the largest retailers in the world.
Before joining BCG, Jeff worked in the area of signal processing algorithms with various firms in Silicon Valley, and he also worked in solar physics.
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China’s consumer economy is benefiting from an emerging upper-middle-class and affluent households, a younger population that is eager to spend, and e-commerce through digital channels.
China’s overall economic growth is slowing, but consumption is soaring. Here are the megatrends and shopping behaviors that companies need to understand in order to succeed in a market worth trillions of dollars.
Companies looking for growth in slowing Asian economies should aim for the upper-middle-class. There are approximately 150 million upper-middle-class consumers in the developing countries of Asia right now—accounting for more than $3 trillion in spending annually. And this number could easily swell by 100 million or more in the next few years.
An approach called demand-centric growth helps companies boost revenues and profits and reverse declining sales and margins. It can be applied wherever consumers make choices.
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