Hong Kong’s November retail sales fell 4.2 per cent from a year earlier, snapping two straight months of growth with tightened financial conditions weighing on local demand, government data showed on Wednesday.
Reuters cited sales dropped to HK$29.5 billion ($3.77 billion). That compared with a revised 4 per cent growth in October.
The figure marked the highest drop in retail sales performance since March, where retail sales slipped 13.8 per cent that month.
Total retail sales for the first 11 months declined 1.1 per cent compared with the same period in 2021, according to SCMP.
Online retail sales for November increased 9.4 per cent from the same month last year, reaching HK$3.8 billion, or 12.8 per cent of the total.
A government spokesman said that retail businesses softened in November following the improvement in the preceding month.
For October and November combined, the value of retail sales remained largely stable compared with a year earlier.
“While tightened financial conditions will continue to weigh on local consumption demand, the further relaxation of social-distancing measures and continued improvement in labour market conditions will provide support,” the spokesman said.
He added that retail sales performance was likely to improve under an expected increase in inbound travellers.
The latest figures do not reflect the government’s drastic lifting of Covid-19 measures last month.
The long-awaited move included the dropping of social-distancing measures, the vaccine pass scheme, and mandatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for inbound travellers, as well as quarantine requirements for close contacts.
In the third quarter of last year, Hong Kong’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 4.5 per cent from the same period in 2021.
The figure also marked a decline of 1.3 per cent from the preceding quarter, while the real GDP for the first three quarters as a whole dropped by 3.3 per cent compared with that of 2021.
In volume terms, retail sales decreased 5.3 per cent year-on-year in November. That compared with a revised 2.5 per cent increase in October.
($1 = 7.8171 Hong Kong dollars)
