COVID-19 TO REDUCE GLOBAL RETAIL SPENDING BY OVER $500 BILLION IN 2020

Retail sales will lose 260 billion euros across EU-5 (the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) in 2020, a decline of 10.4 percent from 2019. While offline non-grocery retail will contract by 20 percent, e-commerce sales will remain flat in 2020…

DESPITE LOCKDOWN WIPING OFF US $420BN FROM CHINA’S RETAIL MARKET, REBOUNDING SENTIMENT WILL BOOST H2 SPEND: GLOBALDATA

The COVID-19 lockdown and the disruption to retail is expected to wipe off ¥3.0 trillion (US$420bn) from China’s retail market in 2020, causing a 1.8 percent fall in retailer sales in 2020 over 2019. This compares with pre-COVID growth estimates of a former healthy 7.7 percent forecast, says GlobalData, a leading data, and analytics company.

China started to ease the lockdown from March 18, 2020, and completely lifted it on April 8, 2020, in Wuhan city, the epicenter of the outbreak. Shopping malls, restaurants, and retail stores in the country rushed to reopen to recover from the losses during the lockdown. According to the Ministry of China, approximately 80 percent of restaurants and over 90 percent of commercial facilities had resumed operations across the country by April 3.

However, despite easing the restrictions, many consumers remain confined to homes due to the fear of infection, affecting businesses that are fully operational again but now do not have the required traffic to trade profitably. Customer traffic at a Walmart store in Shanghai had registered less than half of usual levels on March 28, 10 days post lockdown, while electronics retailer Suning.com also received half of the usual customer volume at some of its physical stores. H&M recorded a sales decline of 23 percent for the week commencing March 26, 2020, against the same week in 2019 despite 99 percent of its stores being open.