National Development and Reform Commission: Further study and introduce new measures to promote service consumption

National Development and Reform Commission: Further study and introduce new measures to promote service consumption

During this year's "Singles' Day" period, some Internet platform enterprises jointly leveraged the resources of millions of offline stores to provide services with the same price and quality online and offline. At the same time, they actively promoted the transformation of offline services towards "digitalization", explored new service consumption models, and continuously met the new demands of consumers. Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission, in conjunction with relevant departments, issued the "Work Plan for Expanding Domestic Demand and Promoting Consumption in the Near Future", which has attracted widespread attention from all sides. According to the overall idea of focusing on consolidating domestic demand, especially the foundation of consumption quality improvement and upgrading, further enhancing supply power, strengthening innovation power, and increasing reform power, 19 pragmatic measures for expanding domestic demand and promoting consumption were proposed.

Meng Wei stated that in the next step, in line with the trend of service consumption upgrading, we should actively develop new service consumption models such as "Internet plus healthcare", digital smart cultural tourism, online education and training, and smart sports, and guide traditional service enterprises to integrate online and offline development, further releasing the potential of service consumption.

In recent years, China's online economy has developed rapidly. However, compared to online sales of physical goods, online sales of service consumption remain a "weak link," accounting for less than 20% of the total. During the COVID-19 pandemic this year, in order to actively cope with the impact of the pandemic, various service consumption sectors such as online healthcare, smart sports, and online education have ushered in new development opportunities and have "gone online" one after another. Services including housekeeping, laundry and shoe cleaning, deep cleaning, and car maintenance can also be purchased online and pre-booked, allowing people to feel the new momentum and potential that are emerging.

Meng Wei believes that the "online" upgrade of offline service consumption has gradually narrowed the experience gap between "online" and "offline". On the one hand, the explosion of online service consumption has begun to feed back into offline service consumption, attracting online traffic to offline businesses and making up for some of the "shortfall" in offline service consumption caused by the pandemic. On the other hand, online service consumption has made consumers' lives more networked and digital, forcing the supply side in the local service and living sector to accelerate its transformation, thereby promoting continuous innovation and development in offline service business models and formats.