Crackdown on extravagance a factor: consultant

The growth rate of China's retail sales and catering revenues slowed down during the recent Spring Festival holiday amid a nationwide campaign against extravagance and calls for frugality, data from the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) showed.

Retailers and restaurants across the country recorded 539 billion yuan ($85.5 billion) in sales during the week-long holiday, which started February 9 and ended Friday, an increase of 14.7 percent compared with the Spring Festival holiday last year, the MOFCOM said in a statement.

The growth rate was down from the 16.2 percent figure recorded in 2012.

"China has cracked down on extravagant spending by government officials this year, so sales of high-end banquets, liquor and other gifts have shrunk significantly," Liu Hui, a consultant at the Beijing-based Uni-retail Business and Management Company, told the Global Times Saturday.

High-end restaurants saw business dwindle remarkably. For instance, top-tier restaurants in East China's Zhejiang Province saw business revenue decline by at least 20 percent during the recent holiday, the MOFCOM said.

"High-end restaurants' customers are mainly businesspeople and officials. Their businesses have been affected by the country's economic slowdown, the central authority's ban on spending public funds on banquets and calling for frugal approaches to work," said Tian Guangli, an expert at Beijing-based consultancy Longce Think Tank.

Jewelry sales boomed during the Spring Festival holiday, experiencing 38.1 percent year-on-year growth, partly because this year's Valentine's Day fell into the week-long holiday, the MOFCOM said.

Rural consumption grew fast. In suburban areas of Beijing and Shanghai, retail sales grew by over 17 percent and 15.3 percent year-on-year respectively during the holiday, faster than the growth rate across the country, according to the MOFCOM.

"Salaries of China's farmers and migrant workers have grown rapidly in the past few years and this helped boost consumption in third- and fourth-tier cities," Liu said.

There are also a growing number of Chinese people choosing to travel during the week-long holiday. About 203 million tourists traveled domestically, up 15.1 percent year-on-year. The country's tourism revenue rose by 15.4 percent to more than 117 billion yuan during the holiday, data from the China National Tourism Administration showed Saturday.

The Spring Festival holiday proved not only to be a growth engine for domestic consumption, but also helped boost global consumption.

The value of overseas transactions using China UnionPay cards jumped by 33 percent during the week-long holiday from the previous year, data from China UnionPay, the country's largest bank card network operator, showed Saturday.

"The price gap between luxury goods sold in China and overseas, and concerns over the quality of domestically-made products are major reasons behind the overseas shopping boom," Zhou Ting, director at the Fortune Character Institute, a consulting firm specializing in luxury products, told the Global Times on Saturday.