FREE

The busy season is coming for Vietnam retailers

• Based on the historical performance of Vietnam leading retailers, except during the Covid-19 pandemic period (2020 – 2022), sales reached the highest quarterly level in Q4 & Q1. For 2023, we believe that consumers will go back to their shopping habits as before the pre-pandemic period. Together with the easing of inflation, lower interest rates, modest economic recovery, and consumption buffer policies, we expect that Q4 2023 sales would present a better performance than Q3 2023.     
• Vietnam retailers have opened new stores in 1H2023. We suppose that this expansion will help retailers to enlarge their coverage, increasing their accessibility to customers. When the economy recovers (expected in Q4 2023), retailers will be able to boost stores’ traffic, supporting sales.
• We consider that retailers would need a lot of effort to increase average sales per store in the mid-term. We believe that the economy should not grow strong, instead of, it will recover step-by-step to a normal level. Therefore, incomes of households will not rise at a high rate, partly limiting the willingness to pay for high value products. Consequently, while Q4 2023 sales per store is expected to recover from Q3 2023, it might not exceed the prior-year level