The Latino growth rate for the 12 month period between July 2003 and July 2004 was 3.6 percent for Latinos and only one percent for the population as a whole. The implications of this demographic growth pattern for business and commerce are significant.

Estimated Purchasing Power
Total estimated Latino purchasing power was valued at $686 billion in 2004 and is projected to reach $992 billion by 2009 – which would represent an increase of 347.1 percent since 1990. By 2010, this figure is expected to surpass $1 trillion – or nearly 10 percent (9.6%) of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, while Latino purchasing power is expected to increase 59 percent from 2002 to 2007, non-Latino buying power is expected to grow at less than 28 percent during the same period.

The proportion of Latinos in the U.S. population also increased by 59 percent between 1990 and 2000. Nearly half of the 9.4 million American residents added to the country’s census rolls since 2000 have been Latino. The top five Latino metro markets in the U.S. in 2000 were Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area accounting for 42.2 percent of the U.S. Latino population that year. Currently, more than one in seven (14%) of all people in the U.S. are of Latino origin, a number which could increase to one in five (20%) by 2007.
By 2003, the 40.5 million Latinos in the U.S had already become the largest minority group in the country representing 13.8 percent of the U.S. population. Seven states now have more than one million Latino residents (Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas.