Japanese Retailers and Chinese Shoppers. The same in Korea too!

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/japan-retailers-hit-virus-home-065207677.html

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200127/p2a/00m/0na/029000c


The dependence on Chinese tourists/shoppers is also big in Korea. A few years back, Korea had some challenges related to some political situations and the Chinese tourist market in South Korea, basically bottomed out. It has been coming back, but now with the virus situation, it too, like Japan is having new challenges.

Tourism in Japan has been very good the past five years. And of course the Japanese govt. recognized the value of tourism for an economy and created more tourism friendly visa situations.

As usual, and expected, in South Korea and Japan, businesses in both countries became dependent on tourism to increase their businesses.

What happened in South Korea, maybe 5 years ago, many of the companies that were created to cater to Chinese tourists went out of business because of the rapid decline in tourists.

There was an increase recently in Chinese tourism returning to South Korea, but now with the new virus situation it might decrease again.

South Korea has attempted to expand its tourism base to other countries in Asia, with much success, but China is still/was the largest group of tourists.

The same can be said for Japan. China as always been the largest tourism group, as its normal for businesses to be created or expanded or focused on the large tourism base.

Time will tell how much the virus situation actually affects both South Korea and Japan and their tourism industries.

Japan of course has to worry about and focus on Tokyo 2020 coming up in the near future.


© 2020, Tom Metts, all rights reserved