China News Service, Beijing, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- New consumption has opened up a new space for China's domestic demand.
China News Service reporter Chen Su.
At the beginning of the Year of the Dragon, China's consumption has "accelerated", driven by new consumption such as service consumption, digital consumption and green consumption, and the consumption potential has been further released, opening up new space for China's domestic demand.
Service consumption "leads" the recovery.
With the smooth transition of epidemic prevention and control and the successive implementation of pro-consumption policies, China's consumption of catering, accommodation, cultural tourism and other services has shown a rapid recovery trend. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's retail sales of services in 2023 will increase by 20% compared to the previous year. During the Spring Festival holiday just past, the cold weather could not stop the steaming enthusiasm for consumption and urban and rural fireworks, and the consumption of various services continued to burst out.
On February 18, China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism released information that the data center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism calculated that China's domestic tourism travel during the 8-day Spring Festival holiday was 47.4 billion person-times, a year-on-year increase of 343%。The picture shows tourists visiting the Bund in Shanghai on February 13. Photo by China News Service reporter Yang Bo.
During the Spring Festival, the Ministry of Commerce focused on monitoring the sales of catering enterprises increased by about 17% year-on-year. * According to the data center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the 8-day Spring Festival holiday is 47.4 billion person-times, a year-on-year increase of 343%, an increase of 19. on a comparable basis compared to the same period in 20190%；The total cost of domestic tourists is 63268.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 473%, an increase of 7. on a comparable basis compared to the same period in 20197%。
In addition, the movie box office 801.6 billion yuan, a record high at the box office of the Spring Festival. According to data from the People's Bank of China, the industry-wide online payment transactions processed by the NetUnion Clearing Company and China UnionPay continued to grow, with an average of 26 transactions processed per day from Chinese New Year's Eve to the eighth day of the Lunar New Year300 million transactions, with an average daily transaction amount of 125 trillion yuan, compared with last year's Spring Festival holiday, the average daily increase of 186% and 80%。
Zhong Zhengsheng, chief economist of Ping An**, said that the overall consumption of the Spring Festival in 2024 will increase, and service consumption will become the biggest bright spot. Among them, the recovery rate of tourism revenue is the highest among China's major holidays since 2020, reflecting the resilience of China's domestic demand. Looking ahead, the unit price of consumers may be limited by residents' spending power in the short term, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in service consumption.
A new type of consumption has sprung up
In addition to service consumption, new types of consumption such as digital consumption, green consumption, and "national tide" consumption have also grown rapidly, becoming a new engine for expanding domestic demand.
In recent years, China's online consumption has continued to grow faster than offline consumption. For the whole year of 2023, the national online retail sales of physical goods increased by 8% year-on-year4%, which is higher than the total retail sales of consumer goods by 12 percentage points, accounting for 27 percent of the total retail sales of consumer goods6%。According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, during the New Year Festival from January 18 to February 6 this year, online retail sales were close to 800 billion yuan, an increase of 8 percent over the same period last year9% to achieve a "good start" for online consumption in 2024.
According to the 2024 Spring Festival "Eat, Drink and Play" consumption insight released by Meituan, the life service industry has achieved a "good start", with the average daily consumption scale during the Spring Festival holiday increasing by 36% year-on-year, an increase of more than 155% compared with 2019. Li Jiwei, vice president of Meituan Research Institute, said that during this year's Spring Festival holiday, the effect of new consumption agglomeration areas and festivals created in various places in promoting consumption has become more and more significant, and a large number of cross-format linkage scenarios such as "catering +" and "cultural tourism +" have emerged, and the online and offline marketing methods of the platform have been continuously renovated, driving the consumer market to continue to heat up.
On February 11, the second day of the first month of the Year of the Dragon, the Beijing Ditan Temple Fair kicked off, which was held in 1985, and visiting the Ditan Temple Fair during the Spring Festival has become a custom that the people of Beijing have followed for many years. Photo by China News Service reporter Tomita.
During this year's Spring Festival holiday, wearing Hanfu to greet the New Year, visiting the lantern festival, and watching lion dance performances are highly sought after by young people and have become a new fashion. A number of scenic spots have created intangible cultural heritage and folk customs displays, and ancient cities, ancient streets, temple fairs, and bazaars in many places in China are crowded and endless. Big data from multiple e-commerce platforms shows that since January this year, the search volume of Hanfu has skyrocketed, and ** Tmall New Year Festival data shows that the search volume of "new Chinese Hanfu" has surged by 683% month-on-month. Sports and health consumption has also burst out in an all-round way during this Spring Festival, and the sales of cycling equipment and ski equipment on some e-commerce platforms have increased by more than 50%.
Consumption is expected to continue to recover.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's total retail sales of consumer goods will reach 47 in 202315 trillion yuan, an increase of 7 over the previous year2%, and the contribution of final consumption expenditure to economic growth was 825%, driving GDP (gross domestic product) growth by 43 percentage points, the basic role of consumption has been further enhanced, and the development pattern of domestic demand led by consumption has been basically formed.
Experts believe that China has a super-large market of 1.4 billion people and more than 400 million middle-income groups, coupled with the upgrading of consumption structure, the evolution of new urbanization processes, the rapid development of new consumption such as service consumption, digital consumption, green consumption, and health consumption, as well as the best consumption promotion policies, China's consumption is expected to continue to recover and further open up domestic demand space.
The Scientific Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences predicts that China's final consumption will continue to be the main driver of economic growth in 2024. (ENDS).
*: China News Network.