Chinese Consumers Are Increasingly Keen On Foreign Shopping, How Can They Regain Consumers?

More than 100 kinds of industrial consumer goods are ranked first in the world, but due to their quality and

In recent years, Chinese consumers are increasingly keen on foreign countries.

Jewellery and so on.

To toilet cover, milk powder and other daily necessities...

This undoubtedly strikes the alarm bell for China's consumer goods industry.

How can industrial consumer goods recapture consumers?

On the Ginza street in Tokyo, there are many tourists from China shopping.

Many shopping malls also put up Chinese prompts.

Zhao Lei photo / Oriental IC

The lack of high-quality industrial products such as toilet lid and ball point pen is a humiliating symbol, which is deeply printed on China's large scale and consumable consumer goods industry, prompting the whole industry to reflect and pform.

In China's industrial consumer goods field, there is no shortage of high quality toilet lid and ball pen core. Nowadays, with the increasing demand of consumers, the lack of all kinds of quality products is the pain point of China's consumer goods industry.

Lack of quality industrial consumer goods

Mr. Huang of Ningbo, Zhejiang, is a sea fishing fan. He rents a speedboat to deep sea fishing many times a year, so seasickness medicine becomes an essential part of his fishing.

Unfortunately, he tried many kinds of domestic drugs and found that the results were not satisfactory.

Later, he was introduced by a friend, and he bought a seasickness medicine from abroad. The effect was excellent.

While taking this medicine, he also regrets why China can not produce such products.

The seasickness medicine in Huang's eyes has been the same as the toilet lid in Japan, and has become one of the representatives of the difference between the Chinese consumer goods industry and the developed countries.

Of course, if the number of industrial products in such a gap exists, there will be too many cars, jewelry, milk powder and kitchen knives.

In recent years, especially in recent years, in order to get better products, Chinese consumers have been shopping in foreign stores by means of tourism.

Data show that in 2014 and 2015, the amount of overseas tourism consumption of Chinese residents reached 1 trillion yuan and 1 trillion and 300 billion yuan respectively.

Overseas spending accounts for about 50% of these spending, and shopping products are gradually expanding from jewelry and other high-end consumer goods to daily necessities such as milk powder and household appliances.

Is it because there are no similar products in China? No, of course not.

In fact, since the reform and opening up, China's consumer goods industry has maintained a stable and healthy development in general, and has formed a wide coverage and relatively complete structure of the consumer goods industry system.

According to the Ministry of industry's public data, China's home appliances, shoes, cotton spinning, chemical fiber, clothing and other capacity account for more than 50% of the world's total, light industry and textile exports account for more than 30% of the world's total.

The consumer goods industry has also become an important livelihood industry and a traditional dominant industry in China.

In 2015, the added value of China's consumer goods industry accounted for more than 10% of GDP. The total value added and total profit of the consumer goods industry accounted for 31.9% and 35.8% of the total industry respectively, representing a 3.6 percentage point increase and 8.9 percentage points respectively higher than that in 2014.

In the same period, the contribution rate of China's final consumption expenditure to GDP growth reached 66.4%, 15.4 percentage points higher than that of last year.

Not only that, from the global market, many industrial consumer goods in China are ranked first in the world, such as household appliances, leather, plastics, furniture, ceramics and so on.

According to incomplete statistics, the output of some 220 industrial sectors ranks first in the world.

China's huge output and production capacity of industrial products not only meet the needs of the vast number of consumers in China, but also solve the problem of shortage of Chinese industrial products for many years and win the reputation of "world factory" for China.

Consumer demand is higher.

However, in recent years, with the continuous escalation of the consumption demand of Chinese consumers, the traditional mass production mode has gradually failed to meet the needs and demands of consumers at a higher level.

China's consumer goods industry is in urgent need of pformation from quantity to quality and brand, from big to strong.

As Feng Fei, Vice Minister of the Ministry of industry and commerce, said, "our country can only be regarded as a big consumer goods industry rather than a powerful consumer goods industry."

According to Feng Fei's judgement, China is in the period of rapid change and upgrading of consumer structure. The consumption of residents is changing from the clothing and food oriented subsistence type and the subsistence type consumption to the enjoyable and well off consumption of live and behavior representatives, and the demands of consumers on the color, variety, quality, specification, brand and safety of consumer goods are constantly improving.

Accordingly, the new contradictions have also gradually highlighted: "the structural contradictions of China's consumer goods industry are huge, inefficient supply is insufficient, manufacturing capacity is strong and innovation capability is insufficient."

This is also one of the important reasons for part of consumption flows abroad in recent years.

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How to deal with it?

In the eyes of the industry, improving product quality and upgrading product brand has undoubtedly become the main direction of China's consumer goods industry next step, and also the main means to "win back" domestic consumers and attract foreign consumers.

In fact, in some domestic industries, there are some short plates of quality and brand, and some may even have safety problems.

Take the food industry as an example, domestic milk powder is frequently exposed to quality problems, so that many consumers in China are afraid of domestic milk powder.

Especially in the melamine incident in 2008, the brand of milk powder was almost completely destroyed, which aggravated consumers' concern about the safety and quality of domestic milk powder.

After many years, consumers still have not fully restored their trust in China's dairy industry.

In view of this, Feng Fei believes that improving the quality of China's consumer industrial products is very important.

He said that in improving quality, we should focus on cultivating and carrying forward the craftsman spirit of excellence and guiding enterprises to establish a business philosophy of "quality first, reputation first" and promote "quality revolution".

Feng Fei admitted that the core competitiveness and innovation ability of China's consumer goods industry are still weak and can not fully meet the needs of consumers.

There are five main reasons for this. First of all, it is "insufficient supply of consumer goods with high technology content, high quality and high brand recognition".

Take the more popular smart phones as an example. Although China is the largest producer and user of smart phones in the world, it is firmly occupied by foreign brands such as apple and Samsung in the high-end market.

From the profit point of view, apple and Samsung's profits occupy the overwhelming majority, and the huge domestic mobile phones still linger on the edge of losses.

It is understood that although many smart phone manufacturers in China, but most of the products are mainly imitation and assembly, lack of core technology and intellectual property rights, so they can only act as "coolies" in the huge market.

Apart from short quality, China's consumer goods industry generally lacks brand awareness.

China's textile and garment industry is well known all over the world, but there is still a big gap in the textile industry.

At present, China's textile and clothing exports account for 1/3 of the world's total, but most of them are OEM. In the view of Gao Yong, vice president and Secretary General of the China Textile Industry Federation, "brand is the biggest short board."

There are various factors of brand weakness, such as historical accumulation, such as marketing means.

However, no matter what the backwardness, it has led to the weakness of China's consumer industry brand.

This is the most typical sport shoe industry. Although China has been able to produce world-class sports shoes, such as Lining, Anta and so on, but in this area, high-end market has always been occupied by Adidas and Nike in the United States, China's sports shoes can only linger in the lower market, and even often face the threat of loss.

Transformation and upgrading require good external environment

In the opinion of experts, in order to improve the quality and brand competitiveness of China's consumer goods industry, in addition to increasing R & D efforts, enhancing core competitiveness and improving innovation capability, the government also needs to provide the necessary external environment for enterprises' innovation, such as increasing the crackdown on fake and shoddy products, and practically protecting the independent intellectual property rights of enterprises. At the same time, the state also has to establish standards that conform to international standards, avoid two sets of standards at home and abroad, affect consumer confidence in domestic consumers, and appropriately reduce taxes and charges, reduce circulation costs, etc., so as to avoid the two prices of domestic products in the international and domestic markets, while the prices abroad are far lower than domestic prices.

In order to effectively improve the quality and brand strength of China's consumer goods industry, the State Council also issued special opinions on developing the "three products" special action in the consumer goods industry to create a good market environment. There are 12 tasks in three aspects, including light industry, textile, food, medicine and consumer electronics.

Feng Fei disclosed that the Ministry of industry and information technology is planning to use the industrial pformation and upgrading fund to set up a "three products" special product for consumer goods industry. This year, the key is to support children's clothing products such as baby clothing, baby products, baby food, baby medicine, etc.

This fund has a scale of several hundred million yuan, and the implementation plan is being studied.

HUAWEI's example has proved that as long as enough support can be obtained, China's consumer goods industry can completely rely on its own ability to produce high quality products and create global brands.

However, in order to make products in various fields such as seasickness drugs and toilet covers reach the world level, the whole industry still has a long way to go.