1/3 Of The World's Stamp Collectors Are In China?

At a recent auction, after several unsuccessful bids, a dealer acquaintance asked:




Maybe it was the phone bidders?




http://www.economist.com/blogs/econ...t-explains-9

Q/ Seriously?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

No surprise..1/3 of the people in the world are in China.

Something else for you to think about...
There are 0.0071% stamp collectors in Canada.
There are 0.0042% stamp collectors in the USA.
As per populations and using analysis from this web site.

Guess its colder up here and we stay in doors more...

Approzimately, the total population of
China = 1.3 Billion. 1,300,000,000
India = 1.3 Billion. 1,300,000,000
Canada = 30 million . . 30,000,000
United States . . . . .350.000.000

I myself would like to be able to access as a buyer and a seller hopefully, China, Japan and many other countries, Russia included, in some secure manner.

There as money out there.

They access systems here in English, so learning Catonese, Mdarin, Kangi, or Cyrillic languages seems worthwhile, comesurate wioth the risks involved of course.

I moan at this because the Euro is is a good position for me a s a Canadian now. US money is expensive to buy from but I still do of course, nice stuff.

What do these other markets have for sale, beyond their own countriy's stamps? More of what I want I think.

Link to Wikipedia
List of countries and dependencies by population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...y_population

Includes percent of world population estimates.

Sorry your number of collectors does not make sense for China . First they buy for financial reasons ,they clearly are not collectors . Sure you look at price values at auctions but that is a very small group of buyers ,they buy to resell . Try selling material other than early China or early PRC and see how little interest .
I try to sell China Postal History on ebay a few years ago and the buying from China was less than 10%. They may call themselves collectors but they don't buy stamp supplies, hinges , or reference books .I believe Scott catalog and Stanley Gibbons sell a few dozen catalogs to the mainland of China , I sat thru a few major Chinese stamp auctions at Rogers and there was three or four bidders from China . But when Rasdale sold a German States collection a few years ago there was 12 or 14 German dealers from the German Auction houses plus a few collectors .

I would think that stamp collecting was stamped-out during the Cultural Revolution; what could be more counter-revolutionary, and more dangerous, than holding onto 1) material goods that 2) were reminders & mementos of the previous regime(s)?

If you are 1) Chinese and 2) looking to park money informally, you buy gold, not foreign stamps.

The billionaires cited in the Economist article (above) might be driving the very top end of the market, where every stamp has a provenance, but how much can that drag the rest of us along?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

What an odd statement I believe that the practice of hinging stamps is prevalent mainly in North America. Other parts of the world use stock cards, stock books, etc. As for reference books, the majority of catalogs dealing with Chinese stamps are written in the Chinese language.

I usually sell to 3-4 buyers in PRC with each auction I have and it's quite random what they buy - some of it is China - older and modern, but frequently it's topical material as far as I can tell. I don't think I'm selling to any dealers.

Back in the early 1990's, my mother visited Beijing and I asked her to find me some stamps and covers. She was directed to a marketplace that was the size of a typical indoor American multi-story mall. It was all stamps dealers. I wish I was there. There must be enough collectors there to have such an establishment.

ikey: I don't know about stamps of older regimes and of certain countries, but China definitely used stamps as a means of propaganda and probably encouraged people to collect such stamps during the Cultural Revolution. We would need to talk to someone from PRC China who collected during that time period to see what was allowed.

I have no idea if it's actually true or not, but I have read that some Chinese do park some money in stamps in order to have something valuable that's easily portable that the regime might not know about/can't find. I've also read that the famous monkey stamps are as valuable as they are in part because they are used to bribe officials. "Gifts" or donations in the form of money aren't allowed, you see, but one can give officials "gifts" in the form of goods. Supposedly the costs of bribes are sometimes expressed in how many "monkeys" it will take to pay them off. A tiny piece of paper worth $1000 or so is very easy to hide from authorities.

in most parts of the world " stamps hinges " equates to " horse & buggy ",

Pagoda

Agree with you ......those stamp hinges are "horse & buggy" because their hinges from Germany and Great Britain are horse crap . I am surprise they get away with calling them "peelable" and "finest quality". Guess the world has no real good hinges.

Most of the world do not use stamp hinges, I presume they are still sold in the US as there are many collectors there who use printed albums,

Pagoda

Collecting stamps during the Cultrual Recolution was considered politically incorrect and is why PRC stamps from that time period are so expensive now because few were saved.

We're coming-up on forty years since Mao's passing; I suppose that's plenty of time to go back to old habits & older hobbies.

I think this is a wild unsubstantiated and unverified claim. I didn't see any data or facts to support this. Perhaps they are trying to correlate the rise of many wealthy people in China who choose to invest in rare stamps and other rare commodities to philatelists.

Likewise, I wouldn't necessarily use the locale of bulletin board participants as a valid statistical measure. The Postal Museum in Washington D.C. estimates there are 24 million stamp collectors in the US alone. I think people move in and out of the hobby during their lives, so the true number of collectors is hard to guesstimate.

Having lived and worked in SE Asia for several years and continue to travel there frequently I have noticed that now that more people in places such as China, Vietnam, and Thailand have more disposable income there does seem to be in uptick in collecting things as a hobby and/or investment.

I think the last time I used a stamp hinge was in the early 1980's and that would have been from a packet of 1000 that I had bought maybe 5 years before. That would have been about the time I made up a couple of pages for a Club's Exchange Sheet.

I will make an enquiry to the Stamp Supplies company here and ask how many packets he sells a year, I doubt it will be many,


Pagoda