The retail sale of social consumer goods in this April reached 400.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year rise of 13.2%, of which, that in the urban area was 265 billion yuan, up 15%,and that in the area at the county level and below was 135.2 billion yuan, up 9.8%. Analyzed by industry, the retail sale of the wholesale & retail trade registered 335.6 billion yuan, up 11.6% over last April, and that of catering trade reached 52.4 billion yuan, up 28.3%, and that of other industries was 12.1 billion yuan, up 1.8%.

    The retail sale of social consumer goods in the first four months of this year was 1683.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year rise of 11.3%.

    The fast growth of market sale was attributed to the following factors: On one hand, the retail sale of consumer goods in last April was low resulted from the affection the SARS epidemic brought about in the most regions. For instance, seriously impacted by the SARS epidemic, the retail sale of catering trade last April only presented a year-on-year rise of 2.1%, but that in this April rose 28.3% with the increase amount of 11.56 billion yuan, driving the retail sale of social consumer goods to rise by 3.3 percentage points. On the other hand, the price rise forced the total retail sale to climb by over 2 percentage points, and deducted the influence of price fluctuation, the total retail sale of social consumer goods in this April actually rose 10.3%, and a real year-on-year rise of 9.4%, thus 1.1 and 0.2 percentage point higher over the real rises of this March and the first quarter.

    The situation of hot-selling commodities showed no new changes. According to the statistics on the commodity retail of the wholesale and retail trade enterprises above designated size, influenced by the prosperous sale of home autos and the rise of oil price, the petroleum and its products rose 50.8% over last April. The sales tendency of autos and similar products still rose 49.1% though slower than the previous duration. The other products with faster rises were the followings: communications equipment(up 57.9%), cultural and office articles(up 34.2%), clothes and similar products(up 31.8%), furniture(up 29.4%), foods, beverage and tobaccos(up 16.1%), home appliances and audio & video equipment (up 14.9%). The products for washing and Chinese & western medicines only rose 3.9% and 0.4% due to the high comparing base of last April resulted from the scare buying in the SARS outbreak period.