Robust recovery of offline spending comes with the Spring Festival celebration

Consumption in Shanghai went well over the seven-day Spring Festival holiday, with a robust recovery in offline shopping showing positive growth compared with last year.

The city's offline spending between January 20 and January 26 added up to 32.3 billion yuan (US$4.76 billion), recovering to 81.7 percent of the same period last year on the lunar calendar (from January 30 to February 5, 2022).

This growth pace was 11.8 percentage points faster than that in the pre-holiday period (from January 13 to January 19), according to data from the Shanghai Consumer Market Big Data Laboratory.

Among them, offline consumption of food and beverage amounted to 4.1 billion yuan, an increase of 4.9 percent over last year's Chinese New Year holiday.

Shanghai's online consumption, meanwhile, posted a total payment of 19.8 billion yuan, up 9.4 percent from the same period last Chinese year.

As for foot traffic, during the holiday, a total of 29.14 million visits were monitored in 36 major commercial areas in the city, recovering to 91.4 percent of the same period of last year's lunar calendar.

The top three shopping areas in terms of consumption amount were Nanjing Road W., Nanjing Road E. and the Lujiazui area.

Across a sample of 200 retail and catering enterprises surveyed by the city's Commission of Commerce, these key samples posted the sales over the seven days before the holiday (January 14 - 20) totaling 5.49 billion yuan, up 10.5 percent year on year (on the Chinese calendar), while their sales amounted to 5.43 billion yuan during the seven-day holiday.

Over the 14-day period, they cumulatively achieved sales of 10.91 billion yuan, generally flat from the same period last lunar year.

Among them, shopping malls including Shimao Festival City, Shanghai Global Harbor, Bailian Youyicheng, Wanda Plaza (Pudong, Baoshan, Jinshan), and New World Daimaru all achieved more than double-digit growth compared with the same period last lunar year.