Canadian retailers round off record half-year of sales gains
OTTAWA— Canadian retailers posted a fourth-straight monthly sales gain in June, closing off a half-year performance that was one of the best for the sector on record.
Retail sales increased 0.1 per cent during the month to $49 billion, Statistics Canada reported. Retailers generated $291 billion in sales in the first six months of 2017, a record.
Sales were up 4.6 per cent from the last half of 2016, which is the biggest halfyear gain in the data going back to at least the early 1990s.
Canada has been in a consumption boom for years, as households binged on cheap credit.
The appetite for spending has only increased over the past six months as the country emerged from the drop in commodity prices and the jobless rate fell to the lowest since 2008.
It’s a remarkable run in spending that policy-makers expect will continue, even as the Bank of Canada raises interest rates. Households will account for about two-thirds of growth over the next three years, the central bank projected last month. That would extend a pattern over the past 15 years of consumers carrying the bulk of the economic load.
“The retail sector continues to look strong,” Andrew Grantham, an economist at CIBC World Markets, said in a note to investors.
Sales at general merchandise stores rose 2.9 per cent in June to $5.8 billion, the fifth increase in six months.
There was also a 3.3-per cent increase at clothing stores, while sales of building materials, garden equipment and supplies rose for the ninth time in 10 months.
Those gains were partially offset by a 1.8-per-cent decline at gas stations and a 2-per-cent drop at new car dealers.
E-commerce sales rose 43.5 per cent year-over-year on an unadjusted basis, a much faster pace than total retail sales, which rose 8.8 per cent on an annual, unadjusted basis. Still, e-commerce makes up just 2 per cent of total retail trade.
Economists had forecast a 0.2-percent gain for total retail sales during the month.
In volume terms, receipts for retailers increased 0.5 per cent and are up 7.8 per cent from a year earlier, which is the biggest 12-month increase since at least 2004.