With more senior citizens in China adopting smart phones and intensifying their use of the digital gadget, e-commerce companies will benefit vastly by targeting the silver-haired population, said a veteran researcher on China's retail economy today in Shanghai.
"China's WeChat users among the senior-aged population exceeded 50 million as of September 2017, while the figure was 8.46 million a year earlier," said Vincent Weng, founder and CEO of Charisma Partner, an investment fund focusing on the consumption economy, in a conference it jointly held with Shou Gang Fund, a fund of Beijing's Capital Iron and Steel Group, and Kai Dian Bang, a company that facilitates opening and running of Internet businesses.
WeChat has overtaken the telephone and face-to-face communication to become the most commonly used means of interacting with others for people aged at and above 50, Weng observed, adding that people born in the 1960s and 1970s were gradually joining the silver-haired population and will demonstrate enormous spending power on the Internet channel.
At present goods and services targeting the old people account for eight per cent of the Chinese economy, valued at RMB 4 trillion, and the overall value will most likely reach one-third of the GDP by 2050, he said.
Weng, who founded the consumption fund in 2012, said that there had been an growing number of mini-programs embedded into WeChat specifically meeting old people's needs.
At present the old people, apart from being die-hard patrons of mom and pop's, supermarkets and other modern retail formats, are mainly visiting Taobao and JD.com as well as Pin Duo Duo when shopping online, said Weng, head of the investment department of China International Capital Corporation (CICC) for eight years prior to founding the current fund.
WeChat was first adopted by the young generation in 2012, and the senior population largely bought their first smart phones in 2014, but they are light users of mobile Internet, and use the smart phones mainly for reading, watching videos and chatting with their children on WeChat, and have yet to adopt the habit of paying digitally on their phones, he said.
Since 2016, their children's intense use of the smart phones have apparently exerted such influence on the aged parents that the senior-aged people begin to demonstrate a strong trend in paying and buying things on their mobile phones, said Weng, adding: "this explains why Taobao started hiring old people as their researchers in finding out the silver-haired people's online behaviours."
Weng posing with part of his staff of more than 20 people at the end of the conference. The fund has its dedicated team of half a dozen of people specialising on industry research as well as several dozens of external consultants such as the author.
He prediciated that old people would take about two or three years, or by 2020, to be converted into heavy users of the smart phone in paying and buying things.
And they will not be easy consumers to satisfy with, he warned, because people born in the 1960s and 1970s had experienced little or no economic hardships and were likely to demonstrate strong desires for customized products and solutions and stress much on the experiential aspect.
Weng made the remarks starting off a one-day conference where nearly 40 entrepreneurs spoke about their own companies and shared their visions for a boundless retail for the future.
This is third year the fund led and organized a one-day conference on China's consumption economy, trends and noteworthy phenomena.
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