Nation’s Lantern Festival set to relay holiday consumption fever
Catering, entertainment sectors to lead spending
Saturday marks China’s traditional Lantern Festival, the 15th day of the first lunar month of the Year of the Dragon. On the day that concludes the twoweek-celebration of the Chinese New Year, the nation’s consumption performance is set to prolong the buying fever seen in the Spring Festival holidays.
The consumption vitality at the beginning of the year across sectors such as retail, tourism and entertainment underscored the recovery of the national economy, experts noted, and the positive result will be reflected in the official statistics at the end of the first quarter of 2024.
A Beijing resident surnamed Huo told the Global Times on Friday that her family saw long queues at stores to buy yuanxiao, a festive sweet-favored glutinous rice ball, to celebrate the Lantern Festival.
“Due to the extremely high demand for yuanxiao around the festival, some popular stores in Beijing sold out their daily inventory in just one morning,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Li, noting that there were a lot of customers queuing in front of the store from early morning.
A staff member from a food store in Beijing said that the daily sales volume of yuanxiao reached 10,000 to 15,000 kilograms in recent days. The largest sales volume reached 40,000 kilograms and customers had to wait in line for 40 minutes, local media outlet Beijing Business Today reported.
As the Lantern Festival is not a holiday but falls on a weekend, catering and entertainment sectors are expected to receive large number of consumers for gatherings of family and friends, Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, told the Global Times on Friday.
Online retail platform Meituan told the Global Times that as of Wednesday, the number of restaurants launching yuanxiao- themed set menus increased by 55 percent week-on-week, and the volume of related orders surged by over 165 percent.
“The surging pre-order volume for restaurants, as well as the high customer volume at cinemas and shopping malls across the country, proves that national consumption is still running at a high level,” said Zhang.
During the eight-day Spring Festival holidays, China witnessed record figures for domestic travel and spending, with both largely exceeding those of the same period in 2019.
As the Spring Festival holidays in 2023 and 2024 fall in January and February respectively due to the lunar calendar, some year-on-year data may not be useful as a reference, Li Yong, a senior research fellow at the China Association of International Trade told the Global Times, while noting that the economic operation data for the first quarter of 2024 will see growth based on the current momentum and will provide a precise projection for China’s economy operations.