Stanlib chief economist Kevin Lings discusses March retail sales which, while better, weren’t able to counter February’s sharp decline
BUSINESS DAY TV: Retail sales staged a minor recovery in March rising by 0.8% from a year earlier, following February’s 1.6% decline. Month on month they rose 0.3% from an increase of close to 1% in February. But before you crack open the champagne, the longer-term trend isn’t encouraging at all. For the first three months of the year, sales are down by 1.1%, which Stanlib chief economist Kevin Lings says is the worst quarterly performance since the global financial crisis. He joins us now. Kevin, so the worst since the financial crisis, but people have been talking about a recession in this sector. We’re not there yet though are we? KEVIN LINGS: No, we’re not quite there yet. Obviously the quarter was a decline and that’s fairly significant. But if you look at the fourth quarter last year, we had positive growth, mostly due to the Black Friday sales in November, which I thought were spectacular at the time. So they tended to boost the November sales, boost the fourth-quarter sales,...
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