Electronics

In the first half of 2021, the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic will gradually normalize, the global demand for home consumer products continues to grow, and the import scale of home appliances in major consumer markets has increased significantly compared with the same period last year. Thanks to the effective response to the epidemic, from the second half of last year to the first half of this year, global home appliance manufacturing orders were concentrated in China, and the share of China's home appliance exports continued to increase. From January to June 2021, China's export of white goods (excluding audiovisual products such as color TVs) was 57.74 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 46.3% over the same period last year and an increase of 43.3% over the same period in 2019. The export scale reached a record high for the same period.

While the market brings demand, it also creates new contradictions between supply and demand. In the first half of the year, home appliance foreign trade companies continued to face problems such as fluctuations in the RMB exchange rate, rising raw material prices, out-of-control shipping prices, and shortages of electronic chips. At present, it is the peak season for home appliance export, and the contradiction between shipping and chip supply and demand has led to a backlog of many home appliance foreign trade companies, making it difficult to make orders. The high cost of shipping has forced some European and American orders to return, and some small and medium-sized merchants even choose to abandon the goods directly, increasing the export risk of enterprises. In the second half of the year, the foreign epidemic situation was still fluctuating, but the home demand was bound to decline compared with the first half of the year. According to the survey of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products, nearly half of the export companies expressed concern about the export situation in the second half of the year. With the continuous increase of the monthly export base last year and the impact of uncertainties such as maritime logistics, the quarterly and monthly year-on-year growth of China's home appliance exports in the second half of 2021 is expected to continue to narrow. %, about 15%.

Annual statistics on China's export volume and growth rate of home appliances

Global home appliance sales recovered steadily in the first half of the year, and import demand in major markets increased sharply

In the first half of the year, consumer confidence in major global markets has increased significantly compared to when the epidemic broke out, which is positive for the sales of durable consumer goods such as home appliances. Take the United States as an example. Although its consumer confidence index has not recovered to before the epidemic and has continued to fluctuate, it has been out of the trough at the beginning of the epidemic. The recovery trend in markets such as Europe and Japan is even more pronounced, and consumer confidence has clearly rebounded. In the first half of the year, global consulting organizations such as GFK and Euromonitor all predict that global home appliance retail sales will grow by more than 5% year-on-year in 2021.

In the first half of 2021, the import scale of the world's major home appliance import markets has increased significantly compared with last year and the same period before the epidemic. January-May 2021. The United States imported US$31.11 billion in home appliances, an increase of 44.1% over the same period last year and an increase of 24.4% over the same period in 2019, the highest in history. Similarly, Germany (increased by 32% from the same period last year and 18.1% from 2019), France (increased by 50.5% from the same period last year and 25.7% from 2019) and the United Kingdom (increased by 47.9% from the same period last year and 20.7 from 2019) %%) and other EU countries have increased significantly. As the largest home appliance import market in Asia, Japan's home appliance imports from January to May increased by 22.1% from the same period last year and by 12.7% from 2019. Russia (imports increased by 34.4% compared to the same period last year), Brazil (38.3%), Argentina (43.1%) and other emerging markets also increased significantly compared with last year.

The export scale and growth rate of China's household appliances far exceed the same period in history, and its share in the world continues to increase

Thanks to the growth of global demand and the stability of China's supply supporting capacity, since the second half of last year, the monthly export volume of my country's household appliances continuously broke historical records. The monthly export volume in the fourth quarter of last year has exceeded 9 billion U.S. dollars. Entering the first half of 2021, the export scale in the first quarter increased by 67.3% compared with the same period last year. In the second quarter, the export scale of home appliances exceeded 30 billion U.S. dollars. In the second quarter, exports exceeded US$10 billion for three consecutive months.

After looking at the global financial crisis, it took nearly 10 years for my country's export of home appliances to go from 40 billion U.S. dollars (2008 export value of 40.8 billion U.S. dollars) to 70 billion U.S. dollars (2018 export value of 75.12 billion U.S. dollars). The average annual growth rate of home appliance exports during the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” period was 6.8%, and the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period was 8.1%. In 2020, the export growth rate was 17.7%, and in the first half of 2021, it reached 46.3%. With a high probability of breaking through the 100 billion U.S. dollar mark, the rapid growth of export scale has deviated from the original market trend.

Driven by demand, the exports of other home appliance markets in the world have also increased to varying degrees. Taking Thailand as an example, exports in the first half of 2021 increased by 34% compared with the same period last year, and South Korea increased by 27.4%. Compared with China’s export growth volume in other markets, China’s home appliance exports have increased their share of world exports, from 25% in 2019 to 27% in 2020. The share of world exports in the first half of 2021 is close to 30%.