The market for passenger cars has dropped by 80% in China

Hamburg, March 11, 2020 – Today, a whitepaper published by Statista looks at the economic impact of the novel Coronavirus and attempts to gage possible global consequences, especially in the automotive and tourism sector. As the outbreak started in China, the effects on companies under lockdown, as well as surprising beneficiaries of the current situation, are being looked at. The whitepaper focuses on the economic development in two scenarios: a stabilized or pandemic future spread of COVID-19.

The effects in China are already palpable: at almost 80%, the most extreme sales drop will be seen in the automotive sector. Statista estimates that instead of the originally forecasted 1.6m passenger cars, only 315,000 will have been sold in February 2020. The passenger car market is traditionally very sensitive to crises and correlates strongly with GDP flow. China is also the world’s biggest market for private vehicles, thus the ripple effect of the Coronavirus outbreak in China is sure to be felt globally.

COVID-19 is also expected to have a serious impact on travel and tourism in 2020. The original global forecast of 712bn USD, a growth of nearly 4% is estimated to turn into a 13.5% decrease. Meaning that worldwide tourism revenue will decline to 592bn USD. From a current standpoint, tourism in Asia will experience the largest drawbacks, with North America being least affected.

The Chinese economy has been affected most, so far. With small and medium-sized businesses being hit hard: they are most dependent on current cash flow, which ceased to exist in cities under lockdown. With 71% of employees in state-owned enterprises having returned to work, things are slowly normalizing. The surprising beneficiaries of this situation, however, might be food delivery services. China is already the largest market for online food delivery, with revenue of 40.2bn USD in 2019 and is expected to grow by 16% under current circumstances.

You can download the full whitepaper on COVID-19 here.

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Founded in Germany in 2007, Statista has about 700 employees at twelve office locations on four continents. Statista is a leading data and business intelligence portal which conducts international market and consumer studies as well as surveys. The business model "data as a service" is unique with no direct competitors in the market.