China’s big consumer market isn’t rebounding to pre-pandemic levels just yet

BEIJING — It’s going to take time for Chinese consumers to really start spending again, despite China’s abrupt shift toward reopening.

About a month after Guangzhou city resumed in-store dining, local coffee shop owner Timothy Chong said revenue was recovering — to 50% of normal levels.

“In late December, customer flow gradually normalized, with a slight upward trend, but [a recovery in] business volume still needs to wait,” he said in Chinese, translated by CNBC.

He expects it will take at least three or four months before revenue can return to normal. For the past six months, revenue had dropped to 30% of typical levels, Chong said. He said Bem Bom Coffee’s first store opened in late 2019, followed by a second store and a coffee academy in August 2021.

China’s retail sales were down slightly for 2022 as of November, official data showed. Consumption has lagged overall economic growth since the pandemic began nearly three years ago.

For the year ahead, Bain partner Derek Deng kept a lid on expectations. “The hope is we at least get back to the first quarter of 2022 level,” he said, noting that was just before the Shanghai lockdown.

Retail sales for the first three months of 2022 were up by about 3.3% from a year ago, but had slowed to a decline of 0.7% for the first half of the year, according to Wind Information.

A return to 2021 — when retail sales rebounded by 12.5%— would be an optimistic scenario, Deng said. “I don’t think people are seeing that as sort of the base case, mostly because the macro factors are actually less favorable compared to 2021.”

The bulk of Chinese household wealth is tied up in real estate, a one-time hot market that’s slumped in the last year. Mainland Chinese stock markets dropped in 2022 for the first time in four years. Exports, a driver of China’s growth, have started to decline in the last few months as global demand wanes.

Deng also noted fears of a second Covid wave, the highly contagious XBB omicron subvariant coming in from overseas and geopolitical uncertainties.

“I think that has also impact on people’s perceptions on their disposable income, or whether they need to save to weather all those uncertainties,” he said.

Chinese consumers’ penchant to save reached record highs last year, according to People’s Bank of China surveys.

China’s big city streets are getting busier as the first wave of infections passes.

But it’s mostly younger and middle-aged people who are out and about again, UBS’s Chen said, noting that older people might be more cautious about venturing out.

After a gradual rollback in Covid controls, Chinese authorities last month suddenly did away with the bulk of the country’s virus testing and contact tracing measures. However, vaccination rates for China’s elderly have been relatively low. Only domestically made vaccines are generally available in China.

Bain’s Deng is also watching whether consumers will start to go out more. During the first three quarters of 2022, about 56% of consumer spending was at home — the reverse of the pre-pandemic trend, he said.

If the share of out-of-home spending can go up by even a few percentage points, that will affect how malls and restaurants consider their business strategy, especially for delivery services, Deng said.

In the last 18 months, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com shortened the delivery window for many products from next-day to just one hour. That’s through its partnership with Dada, now majority owned by JD.

Figures from the company showed that for the Dec. 16 to Jan. 1 period, the one-hour delivery platform saw sales for vegetables, beef and mutton roughly double from a year ago. Sales of refrigerators soared by 700%, while flat-screen TV sales jumped tenfold from a year ago, according to the data.