2021 has been a good year for millionaires: this is the conclusion of Capgemini’s World Wealth report. In Luxembourg too, the number of people with a fortune of more than one million dollars has increased.
In 2021 in the Grand Duchy, more than 7% of residents had a fortune greater than one million dollars. The main accommodation is not included in the calculation. In figures, this represents 46,200 people, who have an average fortune of 3 million dollars. Ben Weekers, director of Capgemini Invent in Luxembourg and Belgium, explains where the Luxembourg millionaires get a good part of their wealth from, unlike the 5.7 million millionaires in European dollars.
“In Luxembourg, compared to the rest of Europe, there is a big effect of the price of real estate. The latter represents a greater share of the wealth in the portfolios of millionaires. Prices have risen sharply over the past two years. Which leads to a slightly higher growth in wealth and in the number of dollar millionaires here in the Grand Duchy.”
The Covid crisis has further driven up prices in the housing market over the past two years. The stock market, which had briefly slumped, quickly recovered. Overall, 2021 has been an extremely favorable year for investments, according to the Capgemini report.
Another observation in this report: not all continents have performed as well as Europe or North America, where the strongest increase in the number of millionaires in dollars has been recorded. Until 2019, that pole position was still Asia’s preserve, Ben Weekers claims:
“It’s mainly because of the Covid. The fact that China is proceeding in a much more restrictive way than Europe or North America, with confinements which are still in place today. Millions of people who are still locked down in cities. This of course leads to a shutdown of economic activity. And this is the main factor that increases wealth.”
In addition to this change triggered by the pandemic, it has been observed for longer that many of these new millionaires are increasingly younger and have other needs. This is what Capgemini wants to answer, which is one of the reasons why the company collects all this information and processes it in a report.
“We also do research on banks, insurance, fintech. We are not only an IT company, we also do business consulting. To this end, we try to discuss with our customers. These are banks and so we can help them make good decisions for the future.”
Capgemini’s World Wealth report has been published for 26 years. It still emerges from its latest edition that among the 7.9 billion people in the world, there are 22.5 million dollar millionaires. This is 4.3 times more than in 1997, when they were 5.2 million. The number of dollar millionaires worldwide grew by 7.8% between 2020 and 2021.
North America recorded the strongest growth with 13.2%. With growth of 6.7%, Europe overtook Asia. The European countries with the strongest increase in the number of millionaires are Denmark, France and therefore Luxembourg. This is due to the good financial situation of some residents of this country, but also to the strong GDP growth in 2021, underlines Ben Weekers.
The RTL report in Luxembourgish: