French.china.org.cn | Updated on 12-04-2023
China’s consumer market has seen notable progress in scale and quality over the past decade, an official with the Ministry of Commerce said on Tuesday.
The country has become the second largest consumer market in the world. Retail sales of consumer goods in China topped 40 trillion yuan (about 5.810 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019 and reached 44 trillion yuan in 2022, more than double the 2012 figure, said Xu Xingfeng, director from the Ministry of Commerce’s Consumer Promotion Department at a conference held as part of the Third China International Consumer Products Expo.
The market structure was also modernized during this period, with consumers focusing more on the quality of their consumption. In 2022, per capita spending on services accounted for 43.2 percent of the people’s total consumption, Xu said.
Highlighting the continuous innovations in consumption models, Xu pointed out that new business forms, such as livestreaming, mobile payments and instant retailing, have emerged in the market over the past decade.
In 2022, China’s online retail sales totaled 13.8 trillion yuan, ranking first in the world. This amount has increased 9.5 times since 2012, Xu said.
He also stressed the importance of consumption in promoting economic development, noting that the annual contribution of final consumption expenditure to China’s economic growth was 50.4 percent, up 7.5 percentage points. than that of investments.