The Flush Attractions & Travel Index (881,160) has climbed all the way to April 13 since bottoming out in mid-March, peaking more than the same period in 2019. Then, due to the problems disclosed in the annual reports of some travel companies (especially the stock price plummeted due to poor management or delisting, etc.), the high cash out of some investors and the negative sentiment brought by the rising trend of the epidemic to the tourism industry, the index fell recently. However, the short-term sharp fluctuations in the capital market of the tourism industry have not affected people's enthusiasm for May Day travel.
Figure 1 Flush Attractions and Tourism Index
01
Data witnesses the May Day travel boom
According to Xinhua News Agency, from April 27 to May 4, the national railway will arrange an average of more than 10,500 passenger trains per day, and more than 1,500 additional passenger trains. From the perspective of the pre-sale of railway 12306, as of 14 o'clock on April 22, the railway department has sold 46.57 million train tickets during the "May Day" small holiday transportation period, and tickets in popular directions such as Beijing to Shanghai, Chengdu to Xi'an, Guangzhou to Nanning, Guangzhou to Changsha, Beijing to Qingdao, Shenzhen to Changsha, Beijing to Shenyang, Beijing to Xi'an, Shanghai to Wuhan, Beijing to Taiyuan and other popular directions are in short supply. In terms of flights, the May Day holiday data in 2023 predicts that the average daily passenger volume of civil aviation will exceed 1.87 million, an increase of 8.4% compared with 2019. As the first long holiday after the Spring Festival, the May Day 5-day holiday is highly enthusiastic for travel.
In addition to major traditional tourist attractions, Zibo, which has been popular since March this year with barbecue and has been forcibly promoted by CCTV and other media, has also become a May Day check-in target for many people. According to data from Meituan and Dianping, Zibo's tourism orders increased by 20 times year-on-year during the "May Day" period, surpassing Qingdao, Yantai and other places, and becoming the first in the province. At the same time, local governments such as Zibo and Changsha have also successively shouted the slogan of "ceding the city to tourists", and Hangzhou has also restricted single and even numbers on the West Lake scenic area during holidays. Many cities have taken a series of measures to improve the experience and actively attract May Day tourists.
The May Day travel boom confirms the gradual recovery of domestic demand. Taking the recent Qingming Festival holiday as a reference, according to the WeChat public account of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, according to the data center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the 2023 Qingming Festival holiday (April 5) will have 23,766,400 domestic tourism trips nationwide, an increase of 22.7% over last year's Qingming Festival day; It is expected to achieve domestic tourism revenue of 6.520 billion yuan, an increase of 29.1% over last year's Qingming Festival. During the Qingming holiday, there were 14,952 A-grade tourist attractions in the country, of which 12,635 were open normally, accounting for 84.5% of the total number of A-level scenic spots. Considering that this year's Qingming Festival did not take a holiday of only one day, most of the people mainly traveled short distances, and some people had the need to worship their ancestors, objectively did not fully release the potential of tourism consumption. The five-day May Day holiday carefully arranged by the state is believed to give a satisfactory answer in the macroeconomy.
02
The economic recovery behind the May Day travel boom
The travel boom has indeed boosted the recovery of domestic demand, but it is clearly unrealistic to rely on tourism alone to drive the recovery of the entire real economy. According to the data center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, "the number of domestic tourists is expected to reach 4.55 billion in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 80%; It is expected to achieve domestic tourism revenue of 4 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 95%", accounting for about 3% of the expected GDP in 2023. It is difficult to derive overly optimistic expectations of a rapid recovery in domestic demand from the rapid recovery in tourism alone. At present, there are still some factors that have to be considered to restrict the recovery of demand, including unemployment rate, income, savings, repeated epidemics, international environment, domestic real economy, and so on.
1. Under the influence of the epidemic in the past three years, the objective consumption capacity of residents is insufficient
In terms of employment, 2.97 million new jobs were created in cities and towns nationwide in the first quarter of this year, a year-on-year increase of 4%; The urban survey unemployment rate in March was 5.3%, down 0.5% year-on-year, down 0.3% month-on-month, and the unemployment rate is also slowly declining as the economic situation improves, but the unemployment rate of young people aged 16-24 in March is as high as 19.6%, up 1.5 percentage points from the previous month, and tens of millions of graduates will soon face employment problems.
In terms of income, in the first quarter, the per capita disposable income of residents nationwide was 10,870 yuan, a nominal increase of 5.1% over the same period of the previous year, excluding price factors, the actual increase was 3.8%. Although the per capita disposable income of residents in the country exceeds 10,000 yuan, in fact, the performance of various regions is uneven. Specifically, Shanghai ranks first among 31 provinces in the country, with a per capita disposable income of 23,489 yuan in the first quarter. Beijing and Zhejiang also exceeded 20,000 yuan, ranking second and third with 21,367 yuan and 20,158 yuan respectively. Specific to different groups of people, combined with the growth of per capita disposable income in large cities, the strike of Shanwei takeaway brothers, the relatively severe employment environment and the current situation of the salary level of low-income people, a simple subjective perception of the author is that the income of high-income groups is recovering or growing, but the income recovery or growth of low-income groups cannot meet the expectations of consumer demand growth.
In terms of saving, the three-year pandemic has made ordinary people and businesses realize the importance of saving again. On April 11, the PBOC released financial statistics and social financing scale data report for the first quarter of 2023. The data shows that in March 2023, M1 increased by 5.1% year-on-year and M2 increased by 12.7% year-on-year. The growth rate of M2 is much higher than that of M1, indicating that the willingness to save is strong, and the enthusiasm of household consumption and enterprise investment is not high. Although M2 growth has weakened slightly under a series of measures taken by the state, the overall propensity to save remains high. The spending power of residents is affected by their economic strength and future income expectations. Ordinary people have low income expectations after three years of the epidemic, and they are more inclined to save money for emergencies, resulting in the fact that the consumption potential of some groups has not been released.
2. The rise of the domestic epidemic will not affect the recovery of the macroeconomic environment
In terms of the epidemic, although with the opening of a series of international exhibitions in April, the domestic epidemic has also been on the rise. However, the state should not take hard measures such as lockdowns again, but rely more on the self-protection of the people. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning also announced at a regular press conference on the 25th that from April 29, airlines will no longer check the new crown virus test certificate of people coming to China before boarding.
In the short term, although the epidemic has provoked people's mood to travel on May Day to a certain extent, the actual travel data has not fluctuated much, and the worry about the epidemic cannot stop people's enthusiasm for traveling. In the long run, as long as production, logistics and other links are not affected by uncontrollable forces, the epidemic should not have an excessive negative impact on the recovery of residents' actual demand.
3. Under the complex international environment, the mainland's import and export trade has a positive trend
In terms of the international environment, the Russia-Ukraine war continues, the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike, the US trade sanctions against China, and the weakening of market demand in Europe and the United States, while the mainland is actively promoting the internationalization of the RMB and deepening cooperation with Brazil, Russia and other Asian, African and Latin American countries. The international macroeconomic environment will be a long-term and far-reaching game. In terms of specific needs, the various exhibitions intensively held in April also showed the strong momentum of China's economy to the international community.
On April 19, the first phase of this Canton Fair ended, with a total of 1.261 million visitors, 66,000 overseas buyers, and an export transaction of 12.8 billion US dollars. The order tracking of more than 3,000 sample enterprises by the General Administration of Customs shows that the proportion of enterprises with an increase in the amount of new export orders has increased for three consecutive months. It is foreseeable that under the strong promotion of the state, although international trade will be subject to the pain of the international environment, the overall import and export trade data should be steadily growing.
4. The overall improvement of the real economy, but the recovery of different industries is different
In terms of the domestic real economy, some scholars have proposed that "consumption looks at the property market, and investment looks at the stock market". In the real estate industry, although various measures have been introduced by the central and local governments, the results have not been satisfactory. According to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first quarter of 2023, the national real estate development investment totaled about 2.6 trillion yuan, down 5.8 percentage points year-on-year; the national commercial housing sales area fell by 1.8% year-on-year, 1.8 percentage points narrower than that from January to February, continuing the narrowing trend; commercial housing sales increased by 4.1% year-on-year, ending the monthly cumulative year-on-year continuous decline trend since 2022.
The reason is that real estate has gradually lost its investment properties. Except for a few large cities, many areas have seen oversupply. Domestic real estate is no longer the era when you can make money lying down if you buy a house. In the long run, talents will still gather in large cities in the future, but the top ten cities in the country have a population of nearly 200 million, and there is a trend of relative saturation, and the housing prices of first-tier and quasi-first-tier cities in the future cannot and should no longer grow as crazy as in previous years, but should remain stable within a reasonable range or slowly grow with inflationary factors. For those areas with a perennial net outflow of population, it is difficult to guarantee housing prices after consuming the dividends of rural population urbanization. It is foreseeable that under the influence of strong intervention by government policies and objective accumulation of demand, the real estate industry will recover slowly, but its contribution to GDP and demand growth will hardly reach the pre-epidemic level.
Figure 2 Growth rate of real estate development investment nationwide
In contrast, in other industries, retail sales of automobiles in China increased by 11.5% year-on-year in March. From January to March 2023, the cumulative export of textile and garment was 462.3 billion yuan, an increase of 0.71% over the same period last year (the same below), of which textile exports were 220.45 billion yuan, down 5.1%, and clothing exports were 241.85 billion yuan, an increase of 6.7%. At the same time, the boom in tourism has also driven the recovery of transportation, hotels, catering and other industries, Guotai Junan Research Report said that China's aviation industry accelerated recovery, not only will there be a post-epidemic profit year, but also usher in the "Chinese aviation super cycle"; According to data disclosed by BTG Homeinns Hotel Group, the GMV of business travel from January to February increased by 117.61% year-on-year. Jin Jiang Hotels indicated in its financial report that since January 2023, domestic hotel operations have recovered significantly, and the overall average RevPAR in January and February has recovered to 88% and 115% of the same period in 2019, respectively.
03
The recovery in demand is sector-specific, but should not be expected too high
The May Day travel boom has shown us the hope of rapid recovery of demand, but the impact of the three-year epidemic, the complex international environment and the slowly recovering domestic real economy all tell us that demand recovery requires a process. The May Day travel boom has brought prosperity to the tourism industry, but also stimulated the recovery of transportation, hotels, catering and other industries, while real estate, automobiles, clothing and other industries are gradually recovering on their own trajectories, and they also need their own policy guidance and opportunities. In summary, the author believes that there should be no excessive expectations for demand recovery due to the May Day travel boom, and in the context of the domestic macro economy, demand will have its own gradual recovery process according to the characteristics of different industries.
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