Wealthy Chinese tourists are expected to spend a billion pounds on luxury goods during the sales, it emerged yesterday.
\nThe booming \u2018Peking Pound’ has accounted for almost a third of post-Christmas purchases of high end goods such as Burberry, Mulberry, Louis Vuitton and Gucci.
\nMany West End stores have appointed assistants who speak Mandarin to help cash in on the massive new market.
\nSelfridges has started taking China UnionPay cards \u2013 the only domestic credit card available in China \u2013 to accommodate the upsurge.
\nThe second purchase in the Boxing Day sale at the Oxford Street department store was made on one of the cards and was worth \u00a31,200.
\nSelfridges went on to process 10,000 transactions an hour, boosting trade by 40 per cent on last year, with one onlooker describing the scene inside as looking like the \u2018Great Mall of China’.<\/p>\n
Retail analyst Jonathan De Mello, from the CB Richard Ellis consultancy, said Chinese shoppers have taken over from Russians and Arabs as the biggest spenders on luxury items in Britain.
\n\u2018Like anyone, they enjoy getting a bargain so the post-Christmas sales are inevitably an especially busy period,’ he added.
\n\u2018China’s rapidly-growing economy has generated a vast new market for luxury goods. But the high taxes levied on imported Western goods in China makes purchasing these products in Britain 20 to 30 per cent cheaper for them. They are also attracted by the cachet of buying a luxury item from its country of origin.
\n\u2018It’s often a kind of one-upmanship among friends or colleagues to get a Burberry or Mulberry item from Britain.
\n\u2018Visitors from China are usually on very structured tours which have fixed times for shopping in certain areas, which in almost all cases means the stores in London’s West End. It is now a huge market for stores in Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly. Christmas holds no special cultural significance for most Chinese, so it is no hardship to be away from families during this time of year and instead go on a shopping trip to London.’
\nHe said Chinese buyers now account for about 30 per cent of the luxury goods market in Britain, followed by Russians, Arabs and Japanese, with British shoppers making up only around 15 per cent of the purchases.
\nLuxury fashion house Burberry says Chinese shoppers make up nearly a third of the customers in its London stores, helping to boost sales by more than a fifth in 2010.
\nMulberry says the Chinese are the fastest-growing group of customers for its luxury fashion goods.
\nNearly two and a half million Chinese people visited western Europe this year, which was up a fifth on 2009, and the amount they spent almost doubled, according to figures from consulting firm Tourism Economics and shopping specialists Global Blue. Over the past two years the value of the pound has fallen by around 30 per cent against the Chinese yuan.
\nChina’s growing economy has led to the number of U.S. dollar billionaires in the country leaping from one in 1999 to 130 last year.
\nHuge crowds continued to flood shops yesterday on the third day of the sales.
\nAt Westfield Shopping Centre in West London 50 shoppers at a time were queuing to get into the Louis Vuitton store after security guards imposed a \u2018two in, two out’ rule because of the crowds. Vast numbers were also out in Newcastle upon Tyne.
\nBut retail analyst Tarlok Teji, of Manchester Business School, warned that the cold weather had still made it tough for stores. He said: \u2018I think we’ll see some really tough trading results. Many retailers will not get close to the targets they hoped.’<\/p>\n
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