Malaysia’s wholesale, retail trade hits all-time high in December 2022

Malaysia's retail trade rose 22.7% to 59.5 billion RM while wholesale trade was up 4.7% to 60.3 billion RM in December 2022.(Photo: thestar.com.my) 

Kuala Lumpur (VNA) – The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) has announced that the country’s wholesales and retail trade in December 2022 reached a record high of 137.3 billion RM (31.9 billion USD), up 13.8% year-on-year.

Retail trade rose 22.7% to 59.5 billion RM while wholesale trade was up 4.7% to 60.3 billion RM.

In terms of performance across sub-sectors, retail sales in non-specialised stores in retail trade grew 24.7% or 4.4 billion RM to 22.4 billion RM, while sales in specialised stores rose by 30.7%.

Other sub-sectors also recorded impressive growth, 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%), and retail sales not in stores, stalls or market (11.4%).

The wholesale trade sub-sector recorded positive growth due to the wholesale of household goods sub-sector which rose by 7.6% to 12.3 billion RM in December 2022.

It was followed 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 also increased 6.1% to 12.2 billion RM.

According to DOSM, retail and wholesale trade in the fourth quarter of 2022 reached 405.2 billion RM, up 14.3%  year-on-year thanks to the retail trade sub-sector that expanded by 23.8% to 176.5 billion RM while wholesale trade rose by 5.9% to 179.7 billion RM.

The wholesale and retail trade for the whole year 2022 increased by 19.6% compared with 2021’s figure and accumulated a total sales of 1.6 trillion RM. Of these, retail trade rose by 23.9% to 661.1 billion RM whereas wholesale trade expanded by 10.7% to 710.3 billion RM.

Sales of wholesale and retail trade in 2022 surpassed those recorded in the pre-pandemic period (2019) by 228.1 billion RM./.