Retail Sales MoM

Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) is New Zealand's monthly retail sales MoM (month on month change) series, with back data from October 2002. Stats NZ (Statistics New Zealand) compiles it from aggregated administrative data (transaction records supplied by system operators, not a survey). It measures debit, credit and charge card spending with New Zealand based merchants, GST (goods and services tax) inclusive, without price adjustment. It covers retail industries, with core retail (retail without motor vehicles and fuel) as companion, and excludes cash, cheques, bank payments and overseas card use.

Stats NZ collects card transactions for the full calendar month and publishes ECT monthly about two weeks after month end at 10:45 New Zealand time. Each release gives dollar and % month on month changes plus actual, seasonally adjusted and trend (smoothed direction) values for total, retail and core.

It also gives actual transaction counts, quarterly series for March, June, September and December months, averages, shares and industry breakdowns with CSV files. Adjusted estimates revise monthly and end-of-series estimates change as new months arrive, so revisions can be large. Data from October 2002 to December 2016 stay frozen. Rises signal stronger spending while falls signal weaker spending.

Retail spending moves with core components plus motor vehicles and fuel, while non-retail activity sits outside the headline.

• Consumables: food, liquor and grocery type spending that anchors core retail most months.
• Durables: furniture, appliances and hardware type goods, often the largest dollar mover.
• Hospitality: accommodation and food and beverage services, sometimes shown as actuals only.
• Apparel: clothing, footwear and accessories, small but volatile in % terms.
• Motor vehicles and fuel: vehicle sales with low card use and fuel sales that swing with prices, and either can move against the headline.
• Non-retail: repair, personal care and other services plus health, travel and courier type activity, recorded outside retail and core.

Seasonally adjusted retail in February 2024, released 12 March 2024, fell 1.8% (120 million dollars) and core fell 1.4% (83 million dollars) from January 2024. Consumables fell 23 million dollars (0.9%), fuel fell 21 million dollars (3.7%) and durables fell 15 million dollars (0.9%). Apparel fell 5.1 million dollars (1.5%) while motor vehicles rose 0.7 million dollars (0.3%) against the headline.

Outside retail, non-retail excluding services fell 55 million dollars (2.4%) while services rose 5.1 million dollars (1.5%). Total card spending including non-retail fell 176 million dollars (1.9%).

In actual terms, cardholders made 160 million transactions at an average 55 dollars, totalling 8800 million dollars. That was up 4.9% (409 million dollars) on February 2023, with an extra trading day as February 2024 was a leap year month. Hospitality had no seasonally adjusted figure that month, so actuals rose 8.6% (101 million dollars) from February 2023.

1. Aggregate: sum debit, credit and charge transactions with New Zealand merchants for the month, GST inclusive.
2. Classify: map merchant codes to 8 ANZSIC06 (the official industry classification) groups and sum values and counts into the 3 composites: core, retail and total.
3. Publish actuals: release unadjusted values and transaction counts for the month.
4. Adjust: seasonally adjust each value series independently with X-13-ARIMA-SEATS (a seasonal adjustment program), with additive outlier treatment. Trend is an 11, 13 or 23 month average of the adjusted series. Independently adjusted components need not sum to the total.
5. Compute change: subtract the prior month's seasonally adjusted value from the reference month's, divide by the prior month's and multiply by 100.
6. Example: January at 6692.8 million dollars and February at 6572.5 million dollars give negative 1.8%, down 120.3 million dollars (120 million dollars rounded).