Chinese brands best performers in China: consumer goods survey

Customers walk past cartons of Yili Shuhua milk at a supermarket in Zhengzhou city, Central China's Henan province, Jan 2, 2014. [Photo/IC]

A fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry survey shows that local brands take up 75 percent of purchases in China.

Kantar Worldpanel Ranking has analyzed one billion households across 44 countries in five continents and 300 billion shopper decisions. The study used its proprietary metric – Consumer Reach Points (CRPs) – to discover how many times a brand was chosen by consumers over the course of one year.

Local brands continue to outpace the market: while the total value of FMCG grew by 4.7 percent in 2015, local players grew by 6.2 percent. By comparison, global brands grew by 3.4 percent. Particularly strong in the food and beverage categories, brand choices are dominated by local players in terms of both the number of brands available as well as in the number of times they are chosen.

Most notable is the trend of increased local brand purchases in China – the three best performing local brands of 2015 are Chinese brands: Yili, Mengnui and Bright.

The 2016 Brand Footprint ranking measures which brands are being bought by the most consumers, most often. Yili leads the ranking – its products have been chosen by 88.5 percent of the population, on average 7.8 times a year, meaning Yili's products were put into shoppers baskets 1,109 million times during the course of the year.

The company has continued to innovate through its premium ambient yogurt range and has expanded its consumer base in lower tier cities in China.

While Master Kong and Mengniu occupy second place and third place, both brands are bought more than 1,000 million times a year, well ahead of other brands in China.

Among the top 10 brands, Bright，Haitian and Libai are brands which managed to increase their consumer touch points through geographic expansion and innovation．

Beverage giant Wahaha, however, saw its position further weaken in the market slipping to tenth place in the table.

Jason Yu, general manager at Kantar Worldpanel, explained: "Chinese brands remain an important part of our shopper repertoire and we continue to witness their success in 2015. This doesn't just extend to the overall top ten – looking at sector specific rankings we see familiar names including Vinda, Bluemoon, Junlebao, Space 7 and so on racing ahead of their global competitors."

"With the slowdown in FMCG market growth and consumers trading up to more premium products, local brands are rapidly capitalizing on these trends and reshaping the competitive landscape," said Yu.