China's Middle Class to Fuel Largest Global Retail Market in 2019, Passing US
China is on track to become the world’s leading retail market this year, displacing the U.S., eMarketer reported Wednesday. China’s retail sales, led by Alibaba, will pass U.S. retail sales by more than $100 billion, growing 7.5 percent to $5.6…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
trillion in 2019. U.S. retail sales are projected to grow 3.3 percent to $5.5 trillion. Growth rates are slowing for both countries, but China’s growth rate will exceed that of the U.S. through 2022, it said. Rising incomes in China have created a new middle class, resulting in higher purchasing power and average spend per person, said analyst Monica Peart. Some 35 percent of China’s retail economy is e-commerce-based, with online sales expected to grow 30 percent this year to $1.99 trillion; in the U.S., e-commerce is forecast to be 11 percent of total retail sales. China’s leading e-tailers are Alibaba ($889 billion in 2018, $1.1 trillion forecast for 2019) and JD.com ($245 billion, $318 billion). Alibaba, with 58.2 percent market share last year, is expected to slip to 53.3 percent in 2019, losing share to newcomers and multichannel retailers, with JD.com remaining flat at 16 percent. By year-end, China will have 55.8 percent of global online retail sales, growing to 63 percent by 2022, while U.S. share of global e-commerce will drop from 17 percent this year to 15 percent.