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By Xie Fang

A report released Monday by Nielsen, a U.S.-based world-leading marketing research firm, shows that Chinese consumers maintained a high confidence level in the second quarter of 2018, the China News Service reported Monday afternoon.

The report says that China’s consumer confidence index, which reflects Chinese consumers’ expectation for employment, personal finance as well as consumption, was down by 2 points from the previous quarter to 113 points in the second quarter, which is still a high score.

More specifically, Chinese consumers’ expectation for employment scored 75 points in the second quarter, jumping 7 points from a year earlier. Their willingness for consumption also rose 4 points year-on-year to 60 points. However, the score for their personal finance dropped 1 point to 68 points.

“The fact that China’s GDP has been growing by between 6.7 percent and 6.9 percent for 12 consecutive quarters has greatly boosted the country’s employment,” said Zhao Xinyu, Nielsen’s president in China. “As China continues to streamline its administration and improve its business environment, more and more new jobs have been created.”

In addition, Zhao stressed that China’s efforts to upgrade its consumption structure and optimize its consumption environment had also strengthened the Chinese consumers’ willingness to consume.

During the second quarter, East China had seen the largest increase in the consumer confidence index when compared with other regions, which climbed 2 points from the previous quarter to 126 points.

Among the country’s different tiers’ of cities, the third-tier cities showed the fastest growth in the consumer confidence index, which had increased 4 points from the first quarter to 116 points.

The report also pointed out that despite a decline in the consumer confidence index for China’s first-tier cities during the second quarter, the consumers’ willingness for consumption in those cities remained unchanged at 64 points.

It is worth noting that 59 percent of the consumers in the first-tier cities reported an increase in their family spending in the second quarter, which is well above the national average of 46 percent.