KualaLumpur (VNA) – The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) hasannounced that the country’s wholesales and retail trade in December 2022reached a record high of 137.3 billion RM (31.9 billion USD), up 13.8% year-on-year.
Retail traderose 22.7% to 59.5 billion RM while wholesale trade was up 4.7% to 60.3 billionRM.
In terms ofperformance across sub-sectors, retail sales in non-specialised stores inretail trade grew 24.7% or 4.4 billion RM to 22.4 billion RM, while sales inspecialised stores rose by 30.7%.
Other sub-sectors also recorded impressivegrowth, namely automotive fuels (44.4%), household goods (12.6%), food,beverages and tobacco (16.0%), information and communication equipment (9.8%),cultural and recreational goods (3.9%), stalls and market (17.8%), andretail sales not in stores, stalls or market (11.4%).
Thewholesale trade sub-sector recorded positive growth due to the wholesale ofhousehold goods sub-sector which rose by 7.6% to 12.3 billion RM in December2022.
It wasfollowed by wholesale of agricultural raw materials and live animals at 18.2%to record 5.5 billion RM. The wholesale of food, beverages and tobacco alsoincreased 6.1% to 12.2 billion RM.
According to DOSM, retail andwholesale trade in the fourth quarter of 2022 reached 405.2 billion RM, up 14.3% year-on-year thanks to the retail tradesub-sector that expanded by 23.8% to 176.5 billion RM while wholesale traderose by 5.9% to 179.7 billion RM.
The wholesaleand retail trade for the whole year 2022 increased by 19.6% compared with 2021’sfigure and accumulated a total sales of 1.6 trillion RM. Of these, retail traderose by 23.9% to 661.1 billion RM whereas wholesale trade expanded by 10.7% to 710.3 billion RM.
Sales of wholesale andretail trade in 2022 surpassed those recorded in the pre-pandemic period (2019) by 228.1billion RM./.