RESILIENT ECONOMIC GROWTH AND LARGE-SCALE INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT PROMOTED THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOGISTICS MARKET

Guangzhou’s resilient economic growth provided a solid development foundation for the rapid development of the logistics property market in the city. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period from 2016 to 2020, Guangzhou’s GDP grew at a CAGR of 6%, although the year-on-year (YoY) GDP growth of 2020 was slashed to 2.7% as a result of the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the quick evolution of economic development towards more digitalisation, the Guangzhou government announced it would build the city into the E-commerce Livestreaming Capital, with a series of strategic acts to support it. 

Meanwhile, the local online consumption market boosted in sync with the consumption behaviour changes and the strengthened spending power of the populace. As a result, Guangzhou’s online retail sales increased by 32.5% YoY, 17.7 percentage points (ppts) higher than the national average level and the highest growth rate among all fi rst-tier cities. These positive notes generated a strong impetus for the fast grow th and expansion of the courier sector in the locality, and to a greater extent, the whole country, and the total revenue of the courier sector increased by 9.2% YoY to RMB69.4 billion and the total volume of delivered parcels increased by 20.0% YoY to 7.6 billion as of the end of 2020. Naturally, this brought about an increasing demand from 3PLs for the logistics property market in Guangzhou, and the trend should continue to point north in the foreseeable future as the digital economy continues to grow.