Chow Tai Fook continues to endure declining sales as a slowdown in China, especially in Hong Kong, shows little sign of abating. Kent Wong, the company’s managing director (pictured above, courtesy), spoke with Rapaport News outlining its strategy to navigate changing consumer buying patterns and enable long-term growth.To get more news about projection necklace, you can visit koalaprint.com official website.
This year has been a challenge. The global economy is still uncertain which has affected buying sentiment. We forecast our sales declines will ease in the fiscal second half since we’re working off a lower base after sales fell last year.

China is now a huge jewelry market. An adjustment was anticipated after a period of such tremendous growth in the previous three-to-five years.The weaker market doesn’t affect our strategy in the medium-to-long term. We believe in China as the economy is still growing at about 6 percent per year.

We continue to implement our “Smart+” strategy, which we launched internally three years ago. It defines how we evaluate and differentiate ourselves to provide the best-quality product and service that will help us achieve our goal to be the most desirable brand in China.

However, we also recognize a need to adapt to a new retail model. We’re looking at how we can personalize our product and service to accommodate evolving consumer buying habits.

Whereas in the past, advertising influenced people, today people influence people. Millennials are highly aware of what their friends are doing. They like to share and show what they have on social media. That is primarily done through mobile, which has emerged as the most important device that connects people to each other as well as to things. That’s done instantly so we have to learn how to capture those instant messages.

Another factor is that the product life cycle is much shorter than before and trends are more difficult to predict. Buying behavior is changing so we have to apapt our selling model.China saw tremendous demand for gold and diamond jewelry in the past decade as people started to accumulate wealth and our strategy was to develop our store network quickly to tap that burgeoning demand.

Today, people are more knowledgeable and have access to more information and the consumer lifestyle has changed. They’re spending differently and are interested in experiences rather than accumulating things.

That’s why travel has become the biggest luxury purchase in China. Tourism increased as people want to try something new and experience different cultures. The second biggest spending is on electronic gadgets and the third is on health care products. So consumption in China is still increasing but it has diversified from 10 years ago.