Chinese travellers rank second internationally when it comes to the number of tourists who buy luxury goods abroad, according to a new report.
But this status is being undermined as global brands become more easily available in China.
China’s ranking as big-spending tourists is mapped out in the report Who Buys Where: Decrypting Cross-Border Luxury Demand Flows, by digital direct-marketing services provider ContactLab andExane BNP Paribas Research. It looks at tourist spending patterns all over the globe based on three years of data, and finds that 40 per cent of Chinese consumers’ luxury spending occurred overseas in the first part of this year.
However, while the Chinese spend most of their budget on buying luxury items abroad, there has been a 5 per cent drop in this trend, matched by a similar rise in luxury buying domestically.
ContactLab attributes this to price corrections by major luxury brands on the mainland, citing as an example Chanel lowering its prices there last year to encourage local shoppers and also deter sellers who buy cheaper goods abroad to sell back in China.
Meanwhile, the value of purchases by Chinese travellers in “European heritage” countries, Japan and the US is significantly lower than it is in China, by 20 to 30 per cent. ContactLab says this suggests that big spenders in these countries are “aspirational first-time buyers.”
But despite individual purchases being lower overall, Chinese luxury spending in Europe “appeared to be rising” in the first four months of this year compared to the same period two years ago, says the report.
Chinese tourist luxury spending has also risen in Japan and Korea in the past few years. In Japan’s case, Chinese travellers are the main buyers of luxury goods.
Chinese consumers have done almost the same amount of luxury shopping in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan combined as they have done in Hong Kong and Macau, the report shows. Chinese tourists went from spending 70 per cent of their luxury goods budget in Hong Kong in the first four months of 2014 to spending 35 per cent in the same period this year.
