The 2024 Central Economic Work Conference will list "vigorously boost consumption, improve investment efficiency, and expand domestic demand in all aspects" as the first of the key tasks in 2025. This decision and deployment not only reflects a profound insight into the current economic situation, but also an accurate grasp of future development trends. In the short term, expanding domestic demand is a tremendous driving force for stimulating economic growth and a key measure to achieve a virtuous cycle of the national economy and achieve a higher level of dynamic balance between supply and demand; in the medium term, expanding domestic demand is a strategic move, and we must accelerate the filling of shortcomings in domestic demand, especially consumption, so that domestic demand becomes the main driving force and stable anchor to drive economic growth; in the long term, promoting Chinese-style modernization will inevitably be a process of transformation from factor input-based growth to innovation-driven growth.
New consumption driven by the application of modern information technology plays an important role in expanding domestic demand in my country. With new products, new business forms and new scenarios, new consumption has greatly enriched the consumption content, improved the consumption experience, and better met the people's high-quality life needs. It has become an important direction for the progress of social production and lifestyle under the new economic form. Against the backdrop of cultivating and strengthening new consumption, new consumption characterized by digital, green, health, etc. is active in cities and counties, accelerating the expansion of consumption space, continuously enriching the connotation of consumption, and is reshaping the consumption structure, promoting consumption growth and even industrial upgrading.
The "consumption expansion" has emerged in the field of instant retail
With the transformation from Everything Store to Everything Now, instant retail that relies on local supply and meets local demand has flourished. Online ordering, offline delivery, and instant fulfillment have created new retail formats and new consumption models. Many companies have entered the market and accelerated the construction of an instant retail supply ecosystem. The International Trade and Economic Cooperation Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce released the "Instant E-commerce Development Report (2024)" showing that in 2023, the number of instant delivery orders in my country reached 42 billion orders, and the delivery user scale exceeded 700 million. It is predicted that in 2024, the national instant delivery order scale will exceed 48 billion orders. This number is almost one-third of the national express order volume. It is estimated that my country's instant retail scale will exceed 2 trillion yuan by 2030, becoming one of the fastest consumption growth tracks.
In addition, the product categories are becoming increasingly rich, the frequency of user consumption is constantly increasing, the consumption period and region are constantly expanding and spreading, and the consumption scenarios are showing a diversified trend from "emergency" to "daily". Data from the National Bureau of Statistics and industry shows that from January to August 2024, the growth rate of instant retail scale was 26.2%, far higher than the growth rate of total retail sales of consumer goods of 3.4% and online retail sales of 8.9%. In addition, in December 2024, the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce and seven other departments issued the "Implementation Plan for the Innovation and Improvement Project of Retail Industry", promoting online and offline integrated instant retail, and exploring new models such as "store and warehouse integration", "pre-sale + centralized collection and distribution". Instant retail has shown unprecedented vitality and potential, which is expected to bring more growth points to consumption.
The "consumption surge" has emerged in the field of live streaming sales
With the popularization of personalized consumption, the enhancement of healthy consumption, and the heating up of night consumption, live streaming sales, as a new consumption model, meets the increasingly diverse needs of consumers by creating immersive shopping scenarios and providing personalized shopping services, and is growing at an unprecedented speed. The report "Observation on the Development Trends of the Live E-commerce Industry in 2024" released by the Research Group of the Institute of Finance and Economics Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Chinese Market Society shows that from January to November 2024, the national live e-commerce retail sales reached 4.3 trillion yuan, contributing 80% of the increase to the e-commerce industry, with a huge scale and a rapid growth. E-commerce platforms and live streaming products provide diverse, easy-to-get, and cost-effective choices, allowing people of different social roles and different stages of life to consume, dare to consume, and willing to consume. It can be said that across the boundaries of regions, abolish the differences in culture and information, and use the "flying bridge" of equal rights in technology, inclusive prices and improved services to closely connect cities and villages, mountains and seas, people and people, and countries. It not only set off a national consumption craze, cultural and creative consumption craze, outdoor consumption craze, and cultural tourism consumption craze, but also promotes the growth of business of more and more merchants, enriching consumers' better lives, and showing the stability of the basic foundation of China's consumer market and the good consumption trend.
The "consumption endurance" has emerged in the fields of new energy and intelligent connected vehicles. The countries and localities have successively introduced a series of policies and measures to accelerate the transformation and upgrading of the automobile industry, encourage consumption, and trade in the old for the new. Consumption in the new energy and intelligent connected vehicles has grown rapidly, and a number of data have broken records. In 2024, the output exceeded 10 million vehicles for the first time, and the total production and sales volume was the world's first for 10 consecutive years, accounting for 40.9% of the total sales of new domestic automobiles. At present, smart cars are developing rapidly in terms of intelligent penetration, which not only carries the mission of scientific and technological innovation, but also shoulders the important task of stimulating domestic demand and promoting consumption upgrading. According to the forecast of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the national sales of new energy vehicles are expected to reach 16 million in 2025. With the gradual smoothness of "old trade-in", the supply and consumption levels of the consumer market will be further enriched, towards upward circulation and sustainable development.
The expansion and upgrading of my country's consumer market is no longer simply reflected in the quantity and scale of consumption, but more in the improvement of consumption quality, the optimization of consumption structure, the improvement of consumption experience, and the satisfaction of consumption needs. Since the beginning of 2025, new consumer products that reflect digital, green and healthy directions have been well-known. New consumption scenarios represented by ice and snow economy, national trend economy, and initial public offering economy have been rising. New consumption formats such as instant retail, live streaming, and immersive experience have accelerated their development. The development momentum of new consumption is very strong, and it is igniting a strong "engine" to expand domestic demand in all aspects.
Author: Wen Yanbing (Dean and Professor of the School of Economics, Jiaxing University)
