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9:29 pm ET Feb 9, 2016
What Slowdown? Chinese Consumer Confidence Still Strong
Chinese customers buy goods for the Lunar New Year holiday at a market in Binzhou, in eastern China’s Shandong province. STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
If China’s economy is stalling, don’t tell the Chinese.
“Chinese consumers seem to be holding up despite the volatility we’re seeing in markets,” says Louise Keely, president of the Demand Institute and the lead author of Nielsen’s quarterly global survey on consumer confidence.
“Retail sales continue to be quite strong…and consistent with that, consumer confidence in China remains stable and high,” she says.
According to Nielsen’s fourth-quarter survey, Chinese consumers are far more worried about their health and work-life balance than they are about job security.
Perhaps that’s because a far smaller share of Chinese have sunk their paychecks into China’s volatile stock market than in the West, or because when the government declares the economy will run at 6.5% to 7%, the people trust their government to deliver. (It might also have something to do with the state’s tight management of the media and Internet, a policy that constrains the ability of domestic and foreign journalists to report news about the economy.)
Or it might be partly because China’s services industry is growing at a clip that helps offset the deterioration in the manufacturing, construction and housing sectors. Many economists contend that while fears of the Chinese economy stalling are legitimate, they also may be overblown.
Although Beijing has yet to wean its economy off the credit injections that helped fuel its double-digit growth in the last decade—and massive overinvestment—it has also tried to encourage greater consumption. A burgeoning services sector, such as shipping, retail and finance, accounts for a growing share of the Chinese economy.
Nielsen says 86% of Chinese consumers surveyed report using digital payment systems for online purchases over the last six months. State-owned monopoly China Union Pay now has the world’s third-largest credit-card network.
Compared with earlier in 2015, a higher percentage of respondents are spending on entertainment, clothes, home improvements and vacations.
Deepening of the financial system is not without its calamities, as the arrests last week for an alleged $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme show. But it also helps develop financial infrastructure necessary to foster buying.
Ms. Keely cautions against reading too much into the consumer-confidence data, as consumption isn’t the same driver of growth in the Asian behemoth as it is in the U.S.
Still, she said, “It’s interesting that we are seeing consumption still look to be a relative bright spot in China despite everything else.”
And as Beijing tries to transition the economy to a model more reliant on domestic demand, “Strong consumer confidence indicates you’re headed in the right direction,” she said.
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