Procter & Gamble's Prices, China's Population, and More

Bill Mann: I think you've got to be more secure in your willingness to dive into the companies that people think aren't necessarily cutting edge, because you know what is cutting edge? Making money. It turns out, when you're looking at a company like Procter & Gamble, that it is a branded product company and so they make products like Oral-B and Bounty and people buy those because they believe that they work. Companies really have to be careful about things like that, one that believes that they have pricing power, because you can raise prices and raise prices and raise prices and people will not hesitate to pay, but there is a limitation and I think Procter & Gamble may be finding right now that they need to rethink what their strategy is as it comes to pricing. The reason that there's a growth opportunity in China has not been so much based on the population growth and it's had to do with the fact and I really do stand on this, the Chinese miracle of taking nearly a billion people from poverty into the middle-class is one of the greatest economic success stories that has happened in history, so there still is the potential for development there, there still is potential for Chinese citizens to raise their per capita income, to raise their spending, so I think we're actually OK thinking in terms of consumption. Yes, the population is still rising, which means that they've got a massive amount of people really below 20 years of age. Kevin Sayer is the CEO of Dexcom, which makes continuous glucose monitors for people with diabetes. From the statistics that I cited yesterday, my presentation, there were 150 million people with diabetes in 2000, there's over 500 million with diabetes today and the cost of taking care of these people just continues to go up.