With China’s economy slowing, retailers are slowing their expansion plans. They’re resorting to new ways of retailing seafood to thriftier shoppers, whose buying confidence has been dented by news that China’s GDP grew at less than 8 percent in the first half of 2012, the lowest level of growth in over a decade. Local retailers are feeling the pain: Beijing-based supermarket chain Wumart saw net profit growth slip to 0.5 percent in the first half of 2012, compared to 20.1 percent in the same period last year.
Retailers are working harder to entice spending. Walmart, which announced it was slowing its new store openings in China for the rest of 2012, is a case in point. Walmart stores in Beijing are marketing fish with serving and recipe tips, rare among Chinese retailers. Detailed recipes are posted next to various species in the live fish tanks at the store. Tilapia, sold at RMB 14.50 per 500 grams, is sold with guidelines on how to cook ‘Paochidoubianjiyu’ a wok-cooked creation. Likewise, a photo and menu explains how to use crucian carp, selling at RMB 11.90 per 500 grams, in that dish.
The recipes appear to have an effect at a Walmart store in Chaoyangmen, a busy Beijing commercial district. Among the customers at the store, which competes on low prices, housewife Huang Zuping pointed to a recipe for Roumopijiuloyu attached to a tank of sea bass (RMB 22.80 per 500 grams). “I had forgotten about that dish, I’ve seen people make it with carp.” Huang, a retired pharmacist, also pointed to blunt-nose bream (RMB 13.50 per 500 grams), sold with serving suggestions for an elaborate-looking dish called Qingzhang. “It’s from the southern Chinese school of cooking, you’d need a recipe for it as it’s complicated to cook.”
Whereas Walmart customers appeared to be buying for home cooking, other big-box retailers are taking a different approach, tempting customers with convenience. A 20-minute drive north of Chaoyangmen, the Gongti Bei Lu branch of Ito Yokado offers ready-to-eat servings of seafood. Sold cooked in plastic trays wrapped with cling-film, 117-gram serving of breaded shrimp paste costs RMB 17 while a 125-gram portion of breaded scad fish costs RMB 5.50.
Take-away boxes of sushi-style meals, with wasabi and soy sauce packs included, sell for between RMB 18 and RM 38. More spacious and upmarket than Walmart, the store appears to be a hit with younger customers, many of them customers from the luxury-brand mall upstairs. “Not many office workers I know in their 20s bother to cook anymore,” said Xie Wenguang, who translates advertising copy at a firm publishing Mandarin editions of foreign magazines. Working in an office tower next to the Ito Yokado, he eats lunch boxes from the store’s food counters. “I usually buy rice with meat, and then take buy some snacks for later in the day,” he explains, checking out a RMB 28 box of six surimi-fill rolls — a communal treat for his colleagues, he explains.
Convenience appears king for the numerous local consumers. “A [wet] market or a Jinkelong [local state-owned supermarket chain] is probably cheaper but they’re never convenient to the office towers, to the places where you work or you drink a coffee,” said Meng Haoran, a real estate analyst who like many locals is forced to commute an hour each morning to an office in Beijing’s business district, from an apartment off the airport expressway.
While younger white collars like Meng are clearly more willing to spend than older peers, there appears to be common ground on certain seafood-related products. Both he and housewife Huang are regular purchasers of king mackerel-flavored frozen dumplings sold at RMB 35 per 500g pack. The dumplings are produced by San Du Gang Co, which also retails a scallop variety of the dumplings at both Ito Yokado and WalMart. “You simply boil and eat,” said Meng.
