The high-quality development of the home industry is the foundation for promoting home consumption. The home consumption preferences of Chinese residents have gradually shifted from quantitative and extensive to green, intelligent, and personalized, and the quality of consumption has also significantly improved. What is the current development situation of the home furnishing industry? What measures will be taken next to promote industrial upgrading and consumption upgrading?
He Yaqiong, Director of the Consumer Goods Industry Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
Thank you to the reporter from 21st Century Business Herald. This question is very well raised. The home industry is an important foundation for us to upgrade our home consumption. As we all know, the home furnishing industry covers multiple industries such as home appliances, furniture, lighting, hardware products, building materials, etc. It is a very important livelihood industry and an important carrier to meet our needs for a better life. Today, our several departments held a meeting to implement the State Council's consumption policy, reflecting the characteristics of this industry, which is relatively large in scale, strongly driven by consumption, widely covered, and has a relatively complete industrial and supply chain.
As we all know, in recent years, our Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has conscientiously implemented the decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, formulated the "Action Plan for High quality Development of the Home Furnishing Industry", established a national level manufacturing innovation center, created intelligent manufacturing pilot demonstrations and green factories, cultivated four national level advanced manufacturing clusters including the Foshan and Dongguan Pan Home Furnishing Cluster in Guangdong and the Qingdao Intelligent Home Appliance Cluster, and created 11 new industrialization demonstration bases. We are carrying out the "Three Products" national campaign to increase variety, improve quality, and create brands, mainly to promote the consumption of green smart home products.
Through these efforts, the development scale of the home industry continues to grow, the product variety and structure are constantly optimized, the consumption scenarios that people care about are constantly enriched, the supply and demand cycle is more smooth, and home consumption has become the second largest expenditure of households after automobiles. There is a set of data showing that the operating revenue of large-scale enterprises in the four key industries of home appliances, furniture, lighting, and hardware was 3.6 trillion yuan last year. From January to May this year, there was also 1.35 trillion yuan, which is a very high amount of data. Minister Sheng just said that the growth of home retail sales in the first half of the year was achieved on a very large scale, which is not easy.
As the reporter mentioned, current home consumption is showing a trend of customization, intelligence, greenness, and healthiness, and the market space is very large. Next, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will work together with various departments to conscientiously implement the Notice on Several Measures to Promote Home Consumption, focusing on optimizing supply, strengthening industries, expanding consumption, and promoting development. I will mainly report four specific actions to everyone:
Firstly, further improve policy measures. We will deeply implement the Action Plan for High Quality Development of the Home Furnishing Industry. Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will release the "Work Plan for Stable Growth of Light Industry (2023-2024)". In this plan, we propose to carry out the "Beautiful Villages and Residences in Hundred Enterprises, Thousand Counties, and Ten Thousand Villages" action, and also carry out the "Smart Home Interconnection" action. Through a series of landmark activities and effective policy measures, we will create more application scenarios, promote more high-quality enterprises and new products, and further meet the needs of the general public.
Secondly, from a long-term perspective, we need to solidify the industrial foundation of home consumption. What we can report to everyone is that we will continue to cultivate 15 characteristic clusters with a scale of 30 billion, leading and driving the high-quality development of the industry. In addition, we will continue to promote new models such as flexible production, personalized customization, on-demand customization, and reverse customization to achieve precise supply-demand matching and efficient matching. In addition, we will establish a product quality traceability system for the home appliance and furniture industries to boost consumer confidence, which is the most concerned issue for the general public.
Thirdly, build a high-quality supply system. We will focus on consumer hotspots such as smart homes and the silver economy, compile and release the "Upgrading and Innovating Consumer Products Guide" (which we have published for 9 consecutive years), release a promotion catalog for elderly products, and promote more than 150 functional, green, and intelligent home products every year. For example, I suggest that entrepreneurs design aging friendly homes, foldable furniture, and screens that can divide more space for families with multiple generations living together (nowadays, there are more and more families with three or four generations living together). There is still a lot of room for development. Here I would like to report that there are more young people, and filial piety and love for the elderly are our traditions. Parents are hardworking and frugal, which is their characteristic. However, they have a demand. If we use the money we spend on ourselves, our children, and the elderly, there will be a huge market demand for household and elderly friendly products for the elderly. Everyone is particularly concerned about whole house customization and personalized scene customization, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is also making efforts in this area. By continuously upgrading the whole house intelligent system, the variety of household appliances in each household has become more diverse, realizing the transition from single product interconnection to whole house intelligence, creating a more humane, comfortable, and suitable scenario experience for working from home. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of room for improvement. We will continue to cultivate a group of service-oriented home manufacturing demonstration enterprises and platforms, hoping to provide more high-quality and affordable home products to the general public.
Fourth, continue to promote consumer activities. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology continues to carry out the "Three Products" national campaign of increasing variety, improving quality, and creating brands, as well as the Home Renewal Season campaign, promoting continuous consumption upgrading through green home products going to the countryside and exchanging old for new. We will cultivate more than 50 smart home experience centers and connect online and offline to expand consumer scenarios. In addition, we encourage places with conditions, and many places have already implemented policies such as home decoration consumption subsidies and loan interest subsidies. On the ninth day of the ninth lunar month and Double Eleven, we can take some subsidy actions to continue to improve our household consumption work.