Continual drop in import taxes

The Chinese government continues to encourage seafood imports in a bid to widen its seafood supply lines. Import taxes on various seafood products like live crabs, lobsters and shrimps etc have been drastically cut over the last few months. Taxes seem to be bound to reduce further owing to an impending civil unrest due to food inflation.

Growing E-commerce

China is all set to reach $US 1 trillion in online sales.
E-commerce giants like Alibaba, look to buying out traditional retailers or signing deals with larger retailers to facilitate online sales. Seafood brands can now target the Chinese market in a much more efficient manner.

Increasing Chinese tourists

The number of Chinese travelers travelling abroad has more than doubled in less than a decade. Key beneficiaries of the increased Chinese travelers are their favorite destinations like Bangkok, Korea, Singapore and Japan. There has been increase in sales in the seafood restaurants in these destinations, not to mention the opening of famous restaurant chains in China.

The Health card

For reasons ranging from pollution to life-style changes, there seems to be an up in the number of people looking to improve and guard their health in various ways. There has been an increase in the number of Chinese shoppers seeking food products with specific health functions. Seafood with its various health benefit definitely, naturally is one of the top products in this category.

The stability of yuan

China spent the past two years defending the value of its currency, with stringent controls put in place to its movements out of the country.
Those controls seemed to have worked, for now. But the country’s debt level, at 266 percent of GDP, has investors concerned. The market should expect the yuan to fall in value if China’s government struggles to deal with its debt.

Regionally, the yuan’s value against the Japanese yen, the South Korean won and the Hong Kong dollar dictates spending by Chinese tourists in Tokyo sushi bars, Seoul seafood hotpot restaurants and fancy Cantonese dining in Hong Kong. All of these locations saw strong spending by Chinese tourists –and so-called “dai gou” (a popular Mandarin term) or tourist professional shoppers, in 2017.

The value of the currency has more resonance as the growth in the average Chinese income has slowed – from 10.1 percent in 2012 to 6.3 percent in 2016. Ever higher real estate prices and new challenges, such as the cost of elder care, are all pressures arriving at the doorstep of China’s middle class. Household debt, at 50 percent, is the highest it has ever been in China. A collapse in the currency would significantly dent consumer confidence and reduce seafood sales in China, and across the region.