Top Chinese Livestreamer Losing Steam Shows Consumers’ Fragility
Look no further than China's biggest livestreamer for a snapshot of the country's flagging consumption outlook.
Li Jiaqi, known as ‘Lipstick King' for his prowess in selling cosmetics, recorded sales of 9.5 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) on Oct. 24, the first day of the annual Singles' Day shopping festival that ended on Saturday, according to a Southern Metropolis Daily report, which didn't say where it got the information. That's down from last year's first-day tally of 21.5 billion yuan, it said.
Separately, Caixin said Li's sales of beauty products fell 38% during the first day of the festival. His share of total sales during the consumer bonanza shrank to about a quarter this year from one-third last year, according to a Securities Daily report.
The weaker performance from one of China's best salesmen shows the challenges in getting consumers to open their wallets. Already grappling with economic turbulence from a property market crisis to elevated youth unemployment, deflationary pressures are adding to concerns about the growth trajectory for the world's second-biggest economy.
Historically used as a barometer for Chinese consumer sentiment, the performance of the annual bargains extravaganza, built around the Nov. 11 event that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. popularized over a decade ago, has become much harder to interpret after firms stopped providing precise sales figures during the Covid era.
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Two key e-commerce platforms operated by Alibaba and JD.com Inc. likely managed 1% to 3% growth in gross merchandise value over the three- to four-week period leading up to Nov. 11, when merchants embarked on their discounting spree, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated.
Alibaba's Taobao and
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