Shoppers 'offer great business opportunities' for companies

The report concludes that consumer packaged goods companies should take "a more data-driven approach to understanding how competitors will grow in each market, and how their own strategic positions will change as a result. They will then be able to predict critical inflection points for particular products in particular cities and regions."

The report comes as China's leaders slowly steer the nation's economy toward consumption and away from export and investment.

Ernie Preeg, an economist for the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation, a Virginia-based manufacturing industry group, told China Daily in early November that third-quarter data that showed production in China growing faster than GDP indicated the country's "grand strategy of shifting resources to personal consumption isn't happening".

Third-quarter personal consumption in China represented 35 percent of GDP, Preeg said. To increase personal consumption to 40 or 45 percent of GDP, "you have to have annual growth of 15 to 20 percent a year" - more than twice MAPI's forecast national growth rate of 7.1 percent in 2014 and 7.3 percent this year, Preeg said.

Growth is expected to slow as the country confronts a "sluggish world economy", according to MAPI (Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation).

China's widening rural-urban income gap also is hampering consumption growth. Last year, per capita disposable income of urban residents more than tripled that of rural residents, according to government statistics.

The Central Rural Work Conference in Beijing was told that income from a year's work in the fields may be less than three months' work in a city. Annual per capita income in the highest-income households was 20 times more than that of lower-income families, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.

Chi Fulin, president of the China Institute for Reform and Development, told a Peking University audience that consumption is expected to reach 30 trillion yuan ($4.9 trillion) in 2016 and might further rise to between 45 trillion yuan and 50 trillion yuan in 2020, Taiwan-based Want China Times reported.

Taking into account the investments such consumption would spur, domestic demand might reach 100 trillion yuan in 2020, Chi said.

From 2000 to 2009, the contribution of consumer spending to the growth of China's domestic demand dropped to 48.2 percent from 62.3 percent, Want China Times reported.

In contrast, the contribution made by investments to the growth of domestic demand during the period rose to 47.2 percent from 35.3 percent, the paper reported.