Finance

U.S. consumer giants have one big sales problem: China

Published

8 months ago

August 7, 2024

Business Finance News

Pictured here is a McDonald’s store in Yichang, Hubei province, China, on July 30, 2024.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

BEIJING — A theme emerging in the latest slew of U.S. companies’ earnings reports is a drag from the China market.

The Chinese economy — home to more than four times the population of the U.S. — has attracted multinational corporations for decades given its large, fast-growing market. But slower growth and intense local competition, amid tensions with the U.S., are now weighing on corporate earnings.

“Consumer sentiment in China is quite weak,” McDonald’s chairman, CEO and director Christopher Kempczinski, said of the quarter ended June 30.

“You’re seeing both in our industry and across a broad range of consumer industries, the consumer being very, very much deals seeking,” he added. “In fact, we’re seeing a lot of switching behavior in terms of just consumers, whatever is the best deal, that’s where they end up going.”

McDonald’s said sales for its international developmental licensed markets segment declined 1.3% from a year ago. The unit includes China, for which the company indicated sales declined but did not specify by how much.

Chinese consumers are saving more than they're spending, says analyst

Chinese companies have also struggled. Nationwide retail sales grew by just 2% in June from a year ago.

In the mainland China stock market, known as A shares, earnings likely hit a bottom in the first quarter and may “pick up mildly” in the second half of the year, Lei Meng, China equity strategist at UBS Securities, said in a July 23 note.

Several U.S. consumer giants echoed the downward trend in their latest earnings reports.

Apple said Greater China sales fell by 6.5% year-on-year in the quarter ended June 29. Johnson and Johnson said China is a “very volatile market” and a major business segment that’s performed below expectations.

After a “strong start” to the year, General Mills CFO Kofi Bruce said the quarter ending May 26 “saw a real souring or downturn in consumer sentiment,” hitting Haagen-Dazs store traffic and the company’s “premium dumpling business.” General Mills owns the Wanchai Ferry dumpling brand.

The company’s China organic net sales fell by double digits during the quarter.

We don’t expect the return to the growth rates that we saw pre-Covid.

The regional results are also affecting longer-term corporate outlooks.

In China, “we don’t expect the return to the [double-digit] growth rates that we saw pre-Covid,” Procter and Gamble CFO Andre Schulten said on an earnings call last week. He expected that over time, China would improve to mid-single-digit growth, similar to that in developed markets.

Procter and Gamble said China sales for the quarter ending late June fell by 9%. Despite declining births in China, Schulten said the company was able to grow baby care product sales by 6% and increase market share thanks to a localization strategy.

Hotel operator Marriott International cut its revenue per available room (RevPAR) outlook for the year to 3% to 4% growth, due largely to expectations that Greater China will remain weak, as well as softer performance in the U.S. and Canada.

Marriott’s RevPAR Greater China fell by about 4% in the quarter ended June 30, partly affected by Chinese people choosing to travel abroad on top of a weaker-than-expected domestic recovery.

However, the company noted it signed a record number of projects in the first half of the year in China.

McDonald’s also affirmed its goal to open 1,000 new stores in China a year.

Domino’s said its China operator, DPC Dash, aims to have 1,000 stores in the country by the end of the year. Last week, DPC Dash said it had just over 900 stores as of the end of June, and that it expects first-half revenue growth of at least 45% to 2 billion yuan ($280 million).

Local competition

Coca-Cola noted “subdued” consumer confidence in China, where volumes fell in contrast to growth in Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea. Asia Pacific net operating revenue fell by 4% year-on-year to $1.51 billion in the quarter ended June 28.

“There’s a general macro softness as the overall economy works through some of the structural issues around real estate, pricing, etc.,” Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO James Quincey said on an earnings call.

But he attributed the drop in China volumes “entirely” to the company’s shift from unprofitable water products in the country toward sparkling water, juice and teas. “I think the sparkling volume was slightly positive in China,” Quincey said.

Having to adapt to a new mix of products and promotions was a common occurrence in U.S. companies’ earnings calls.

“We’ve continued to face a more cautious consumer spending and intensified competition in the past year,” Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said on an earnings call. “Unprecedented store expansion and a mass segment price war at the expense of comp and profitability have also caused significant disruption to the operating environment.”

Starbucks reported China same-store sales dropped by 14% in the quarter ended June 30, far steeper than the 2% decline in the U.S.

Chinese rival Luckin Coffee, whose drinks can cost half the price of one at Starbucks, reported a 20.9% drop in same-store sales for the quarter ended June 30.

But the company claimed sales for those stores surged by nearly 40% to the equivalent of $863.7 million. Luckin has more than 13,000 self-operated stores, primarily in China.

Starbucks said its 7,306 stores in China saw revenue drop by 11% to $733.8 million during the same quarter.

Both companies face many competitors in China, from Cotti Coffee on the lower end to Peet’s on the higher end. The only public disclosures regarding Peet’s China business described it as “strong double-digit organic sales growth” in the first half of the year.

Bright spots

Not all major consumer brands have reported such difficulties.

Canada Goose reported Greater China sales grew by 12.3% to 21.9 million Canadian dollars ($15.8 million) in the quarter ended June 30.

Athletic shoe brands also reported growth in China, while warning of slowdown ahead.

Nike reported 7% year-on-year growth in Greater China revenue — nearly 15% of its business — for the quarter ended May 31.

“While our outlook for the near term has softened, we remain confident in Nike’s competitive position in China in the long term,” said Matthew Friend, CFO and executive vice president of the company.

Adidas reported 9% growth in Greater China revenue for the quarter ended June 30. The region accounts for about 14% of the company’s total net revenue.

CEO Bjorn Gulden said on an earnings call that Adidas was taking market share in China every month, but local brands posed fierce competition. “Many of them are manufacturers that go then straight to retail with their own stores,” he said. “So the speed they have and the price value they have for that consumer was different than it was earlier. And we are trying to adjust to that.”

Skechers reported 3.4% year-on-year growth in China in the three months ended June 30.

“We continue to think China is on the road to recovery,” Skechers CFO John Vandemore said on an earnings call. “We expect a better second half of the year than what we’ve seen thus far, but we are watching things carefully.”

— CNBC’s Robert Hum and Sonia Heng contributed to this report.

Finance

China’s response to U.S. tariffs will likely focus on stimulus, trade

Published

2 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

Chinese national flags flutter on boats near shipping containers at the Yangshan Port outside Shanghai, China, February 7, 2025.

Go Nakamura | Reuters

BEIJING — China’s reaction to new U.S. tariffs will likely focus on domestic stimulus and strengthening ties with trading partners, according to analysts based in Greater China.

Hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced additional 34% tariffs on China, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce called on the U.S. to cancel the tariffs, and vowed unspecified countermeasures. The sweeping U.S. policy also slapped new duties on the European Union and major Asian countries.

Chinese exports to the U.S. this year had already been hit by 20% in additional tariffs, raising the total rate on shipments from China to 54%, among the highest levied by the Trump administration. The effective rate for individual product lines can vary.

But, as has been the case, the closing line of the Chinese statement was a call to negotiate.

“I think the focus of China’s response in the near term won’t be retaliatory tariffs or such measures,” said Bruce Pang, adjunct associate professor at CUHK Business School. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese-language statement.

Instead, Pang expects China to focus on improving its own economy by diversifying export destinations and products, as well as doubling down on its priority of boosting domestic consumption.

Watch for cascading tariffs as tariffs reroute trade within Asia, says economist

China, the world’s second-largest economy, has since September stepped up stimulus efforts by expanding the fiscal deficit, increasing a consumption trade-in subsidy program and calling for a halt in the real estate slump. Notably, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a rare meeting with tech entrepreneurs including Alibaba founder Jack Ma in February, in a show of support for the private sector.

The policy reversal — from regulatory tightening in recent years — reflects how Beijing has been “anticipating the coming slowdown or even crash in exports,” Macquarie’s Chief China Economist Larry Hu said in a report, ahead of Trump’s latest tariff announcement. He pointed out that the pandemic-induced export boom of 2021 enabled Beijing to “launch a massive regulatory campaign.”

“My view stays the same,” Hu said in an email Thursday. “Beijing will use domestic stimulus to offset the impact of tariffs, so that they could still achieve the growth target of ‘around 5%.'”

Instead of retaliatory tariffs, Hu also expects Beijing will focus on still using blacklists, export controls on critical minerals and probes into foreign companies in China. Hu also anticipates China will keep the yuan strong against the U.S. dollar and resist calls from retailers to cut prices — as a way to push inflationary pressure onto the U.S.

China’s top leaders in early March announced they would pursue a target of around 5% growth in gross domestic product this year, a task they emphasized would require “very arduous work” to achieve. The finance ministry also hinted it could increase fiscal support if needed.

About 20% of China’s economy relies on exports, according to Goldman Sachs. They previously estimated that new U.S. tariffs of around 60% on China would lower real GDP by around 2 percentage points. The firm still maintains a full-year forecast of 4.5% GDP growth.

Changing global trade

What’s different from the impact of tariffs under Trump’s first term is that China is not the only target, but one of a swath of countries facing hefty levies on their exports to the U.S. Some of these countries, such as Vietnam and Thailand, had served as alternate routes for Chinese goods to reach the U.S.

At the Chinese export hub of Yiwu on Thursday, businesses seemed nonchalant about the impact of the new U.S. tariffs, due to a perception their overseas competitors wouldn’t gain an advantage, said Cameron Johnson, a Shanghai-based senior partner at consulting firm Tidalwave Solutions.

He pointed out that previously, the U.S. had focused its trade measures on forcing companies to remove China from their supply chains and go to other countries. But Chinese manufacturers had expanded overseas alongside that diversification, he said.

“The reality is this [new U.S. tariff policy] essentially gives most of Asia and Africa to China, and the U.S. is not prepared,” Johnson said. He expects China won’t make things unnecessarily difficult for U.S. businesses operating in the country and instead will try harder to build other trade relationships.

Since Trump’s first four-year term ended in early 2021, China has increased its trade with Southeast Asia so much that the region is now Beijing’s largest trading partner, followed by the European Union and then the U.S.

The 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) joined China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in forming the world’s largest free trade bloc — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) — which came into being in early 2022. The U.S. and India are not members of the RCEP.

“RCEP member countries will naturally deepen trade ties with one another,” Yue Su, principal economist, China, at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a note Thursday.

“This is also partly because China’s economy is likely to remain the most — or at least among the most—stable in relative terms, given the government’s strong commitment to its growth targets and its readiness to deploy fiscal policy measures when needed,” she said.

Uncertainties remain

The extent to which all countries will be slapped with tariffs this week remains uncertain as Trump is widely expected to use the duties as a negotiating tactic, especially with China.

He said last week the U.S. could lower its tariffs on China to help close a deal for Beijing-based ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

But the level of new tariffs on China was worse than many investors expected.

“Unlike some of the optimistic market forecasts, we do not expect a US-China bilateral grand bargain,” Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, said in a note Thursday.

“We expect tensions between these two mega economies to worsen significantly,” he said, “especially as China has been making large strides in high-tech sectors, including AI and robotics.”