The rise of outdoor culture is increasingly capturing the hearts of the "new middle class," with niche activities such as camping, frisbee, skateboarding and rock climbing reaching the masses.
In recent years, RV culture has traveled across the ocean to China. It originated in Europe, but spread in the United States. At home, the RV did not leap to become a symbol of freedom and adventure, but a middle-class idea.
"The RV market is targeting the middle class right now." Recently, SAIC Motor home general manager Yang Songbai in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald stressed.
Small, sophisticated emerging markets
According to the Global Camping Report 2022 released by global infrastructure services company AECOM, the global camping market is expected to grow from $62 billion in 2021 to $68.93 billion in 2022, with an estimated compound annual growth rate of 11.2%.
In recent years, the culture and tourism industry and consumption structure continues to upgrade, private and more secure RV tour is favored by more and more people, and the RV self-drive tour users strong consumption power and a large base of hidden consumer groups, also brought more imagination to this market.
Overall, RV travel is in its infancy compared to traditional tourism. In front of the expanding industry cake, walk in the front of the industry is more likely to share a share of the pie. Saic Motor Home accounts for nearly 70% of the domestic RV travel market, which makes it enjoy more rights of discourse and product bargaining.
Since the end of last year, the travel market has been picking up, and the RV market is showing positive signs of recovery. According to RV Living, orders increased 2.5 times from January to February this year compared with the same period last year. Rv took camping wind, peak season even appeared "a car is difficult to find" phenomenon.
On the other hand, as a one-stop service platform to provide RV life, RV life home self-operated RV, camp and other supporting facilities, the early asset investment cost is high, the return cycle is relatively long. Like the cultural travel industry, the RV industry is also affected by the fluctuation of the off-peak season, so its off-season operating costs need to be reassessed.
However, Yang Songbai still holds an open attitude to the future of the RV market, "In fact, we encourage the idle RV on the market to join our team, by us to operate together, promote together. A small percentage of non-owned assets, non-owned vehicles can be incorporated into the fleet and operated together, which may be more conducive to the healthy growth of the market." At the same time, RV living home is also building RV Internet platform, contact online and offline resources interworking.
How to attract the middle class?
The simple consensus is that middle class is no longer a simple economic concept, but encompasses cultural and social attributes as well.
It seems that the concept of the new middle class may be traced back to 2015, when Wu Xiaobo published an article titled "Go to Japan to Buy a toilet Seat," which revealed the image of a group of high-spending people who are different from the traditional middle class.
Nowadays, sharing RV life has become a new "traffic password" on Chinese social platforms. As an extension of the concept of "home", RV is a symbol of a new way of life, through the rental of RV travel can make dreams into reality.
However, at present, RV is still a niche industry, and consumers have little and narrow cognition of RV. The mismatch between relevant industry policies and infrastructure is also the bottleneck of RV travel market. Yang Songbai also appealed in the interview, "We also hope that the government can promote the construction of supporting facilities. It takes a long time to pay back the investment in RV travel, like the investment in self-owned camps, but government support and resource tilting can speed up the process."
Chery Automobile Co., LTD. Party Secretary Yin Tongyue also said in public, at present, China RV tourism industry scale and level is still in the preliminary stage, on the one hand, due to the nature of the land planning policy, supporting RV campsites less, camp development is slow, RV parking difficult, after-sales difficult, difficult supply, poor experience and other problems prominent, Compared with European and American market camps as popular and convenient as gas stations, there is a far gap; On the other hand, RV rental market is also in urgent need of development, urgent need to strengthen overall planning and normative guidance.
