Poster of the film Lost in the Stars is seen in a cinema in Nanjing on July 5, 2023. Photo: VCG

China's summer box office reached 18 billion yuan ($2.47 billion) by 7pm on Friday, exceeding the total box office of 17.779 billion yuan in the same period in 2019, hitting a new record high, according to data from online ticket platform Maoyan.

Industry insiders said that this year's summer movie themes are diverse and of high quality, showing China's great potential for movie creation as the cinema market continues to recover and improve.

According to China Film Administration, the number of people who watched movies during the summer holidays exceeded 435 million.

Up to now, the top six of this year's summer box office are all domestic movies. Among them, Lost in the Stars ranked first in the summer box office list.

In addition to the good performance in the summer box office, the country's air passenger travel set records in July, boosted by soaring summer demand as the civil aviation market recovered quickly after the pandemic.

Passenger trips rose 83.7 percent year-on-year to 62.428 million, a rise of 5.3 percent from the same period in 2019 to mark a new record in monthly air passenger trips in the country, data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China showed.

China's retail sales grew by 2.5 percent year-on-year to 3.68 trillion yuan in July, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Although July consumption was dragged down by weak big-ticket spending, the sector remained a driving force for the economy and services consumption saw an accelerated recovery, Fu Linghui, an NBS spokesperson, told a press conference on Tuesday, noting that the slowdown was mainly caused by lackluster vehicle consumption.

Consumers' demand for smart and intelligent products is growing. In the second quarter, China surpassed the US as the largest single market for iPhones in terms of shipments, data from market analysis site TechInsights showed.

Recently, China has rolled out support policies to shore up consumption. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce vowed to take measures to help rural e-commerce, including cultivating local brands and improving express delivery, as part of a three-year action plan to boost rural consumption.

At the end of July, China's National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planner, unveiled 20 administrative measures to recover and expand domestic spending, vowing to stabilize spending on big-ticket items such as new-energy vehicles and expanding new types of consumption including green and digital consumption.

Global Times