Courier sector delivers rapid growth over holiday

China's courier sector saw rapid growth during the past five-day May Day holiday, with parcels collected and delivered both surpassing 1 billion pieces, People's Daily reported.

A total of 1.1 billion parcels were collected during the period, up 41.8 percent year-on-year, while 1.04 billion parcels were delivered, up 38.93 percent from a year earlier, the State Post Bureau said Wednesday.

China's express delivery business rebounded from a low level in January, and experienced positive growth in February. At present, the growth remained at a high level of over 30 percent.

The online shopping festival, which runs from April 28 to May 10 and is jointly launched by the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the State Post Bureau and the China Consumers Association, has promoted express deliveries in the near term, an official from the bureau said.

The booming online sales of food, daily necessities and electronic devices has stimulated small and medium-sized enterprises to resume work, the bureau said, adding that online sales of agricultural products also maintained fast growth thanks to sufficient supply and demand.

Meanwhile, from May 1 to 5, total online payments topped 1.57 trillion yuan, or 0.31 trillion yuan per day, according to a report released by Chinese card payment giant China UnionPay. The number of transactions surged by 6.95 percent month-on-month.

As the country's resumption of work and business activities has picked up pace, the consumption of accommodation, catering services, supermarkets, department stores and gas stations remained flat from a year earlier. Aviation, railway and other public transportation also showed significant signs of recovery during the holiday.

During the period, Xinjiang, Hainan, Tibet and Qinghai became popular domestic tourism destinations, with rapid growth in terms of the number of transactions by nonlocal tourists.