Consumer confidence improves
Vietnam advanced in the latest consumer confidence ranking by global information and measurement company Nielsen.
The firm said in an online report earlier this week that Vietnam's consumer confidence index reached 108 points in Q4/2015, up three points over Q3/2015.
This helped the country rank sixth globally in terms of optimism in the fourth quarter, compared with its tenth position recorded in the third.
Nielsen Vietnam General Director Vaughan Ryan said that, with sharply rising consumer spending, retailer sentiment had clearly improved during the last Lunar New Year holidays – the busiest shopping season of the year.
The report said consumers were willing to spend big, although saving remained a growing trend in the context of rising living costs.
Sixty percent of Vietnamese people reduced spending on cooking gas, electricity and clothes, and about half of them cut expenses on entertainment and telephone communication in the past year.
Vietnamese people are more concerned about building a solid financial foundation for their future, just like those surveyed in other Southeast Asian nations.
 |
However, 44% of Vietnamese consumers (up two percentage points) said they were willing to reserve money for travel and vacations, 38% (up two percentage points) were willing to buy new technological products, and 37% (up three percentage) were willing to use recreation services.
ANZ Bank also reported record high consumer confidence in Vietnam last December.
"Vietnam's economic outperformance from both an external and now a likely domestic perspective is confirmed," Glenn Maguire, the chief economist of the bank in South Asia, ASEAN and the Pacific said.
"Our final reading of the Vietnam consumer confidence index leaves us in no doubt that the country will be one of Asia's outperforming economies in the period 2016 to 2017," he said.
The Nielsen report also pointed out that Southeast Asian nations were the most optimistic in the world. The Philippines ranked second globally with the consumer confidence index reaching 117 points in the last quarter, while Indonesia ranked third at 115 points, and Thailand ranked fourth at 114 points.
