BEIJING: The eight-day National Day holiday, overlapping the Mid-Autumn Festival, is set for a spending boom in various sectors, boding well for China’s further economic recovery.
The tourism sector, reeling from the COVID-19 epidemic, is eyeing a stepped-up rebound. Data from Trip.com Group said the number of domestic trips during the holiday is likely to top 600 million, 70 to 80 percent of the amount registered at the same time last year.
Cultural entertainment consumption is also expected to embrace a lucrative period. The box office during the period could log as much as 4.6 billion yuan (about 675.47 million U.S. dollars), or 110 percent of the seven-day National Day holiday in 2019, said Zhang Xueqing, an analyst with China International Capital Corporation Limited. The catering industry is seeing robust restorative growth. In the fortnight before the holiday, dine-in orders nationwide saw an over 40-percent year-on-year increase, and online bookings for the holiday surged by 37 percent, according to data from Meituan, a major e-commerce platform for services. The upbeat signs in these areas mirror the revival of consumption, the main engine of China’s economic growth.
Official data showed that retail sales of consumer goods, a significant indicator of China’s consumption, rose by 0.5 percent year on year in August, returning to growth for the first time this year. The State Council stressed the importance of boosting consumption in an executive meeting on Sept. 10, urging efforts to remove consumption-related bottlenecks and encourage market players to embrace innovation to further unleash the potential of domestic demand and inject impetus into economic recovery.. –Agencies
