Financial writer Wu Xiaobo also mentioned in his speech that "what we will see in the second half of 2020 are monetary easing policies, large-scale investment by industries, and retaliatory consumption by the public, respectively."
Recently released data seems to corroborate this view. Recently, Wang Bin, deputy director of the Market Operation Department of the Ministry of Commerce, introduced that in the second half of February, the average daily sales of the 1,000 retail enterprises monitored by the Ministry of Commerce increased by 5.6 percent compared with that of mid-February, and began to return to positive growth since the second half of January, when the chain of consecutive negative growth.
Businesses and investors alike are looking forward to the trough. Do these views and figures signal that a big wave of retaliatory spending is on the way?
From the SARS point of view, there is no retaliatory consumption
Learning from history, you can know the rise and fall, if you want to get a glimpse of the trend of the consumer industry after the new crown epidemic, we may wish to cast our eyes 17 years ago.
November 2002, China found the first case of SARS patients, the following year, March-April into the peak of the epidemic, in mid- to late May, due to the epidemic prevention measures and efforts have been upgraded, SARS gradually into the tail end of the epidemic until June is basically over.
SARS caused a precipitous drop in revenue in China's consumer sector, with the restaurant industry being particularly affected. In April and May, the worst month of SARS, the restaurant industry's growth rate fell 20-30%.
After the end of the epidemic, the restaurant industry revenue stepped into the upward range, but this time the growth is not so much retaliatory consumption, seems to be more like a recovery, after all, until September 2003, the restaurant industry's year-on-year growth rate to return to the same level last year, and did not appear to be a significant improvement.
In other words, the so-called retaliatory consumption may simply be a false proposition, with consumers spending relatively more intensively under the epidemic's squeeze, and that's just the illusion of retaliatory consumption.
Zhang Weiguo, founder of Ms. Pay in Chengdu, told Euromonitor, "The ones that should be bought are concentrated after the end of the epidemic, which belongs to the postponement of the rigid consumption, and can't be regarded as a retaliatory rebound."
And this time, the new Crown Pneumonia is more spreading, although the domestic epidemic has been effectively controlled, but there is a new outbreak worldwide, which also hinders the restoration of consumer confidence.
Zhao Jianguang, vice president of Wang Xiangyuan, agreed that the restaurant industry recovered relatively quickly after SARS, but "the rebound will be much slower this time."
According to Zhao's judgment, in addition to a more complex epidemic, residents' spending power has also been hit by the epidemic. For example, the output value of Shanghai's comprehensive service industry accounts for 70 percent of GDP, because of the epidemic, the comprehensive service industry stops, the residents' income will be affected to varying degrees, and ultimately, when consuming, consumers will become more rational.
There is a theory of Survival Bias in statistics, which refers to the fact that people can only see the results that come out of some kind of screening, without realizing the process of screening, and therefore ignore the key information that has been screened out.
Recently, we have often seen articles that say companies survived SARS and ushered in retaliatory growth, such as Ctrip, which stabilized its position as the industry's leading company in the wake of the 2003 epidemic, and successfully logged on to the Nasdaq market in the US within six months of the end of SARS, which is a classic case of survivor bias, since we can't even remember the names of the companies that fell off the radar.