ANZ-Roy Morgan New Zealand Consumer Confidence drops 21.5pts to 84.8 in April – lowest since July 2008
Consumer confidence fell 21 points in April to 84.8, about where it troughed in 2008 when the Global Financial Crisis hit.
- The net proportion of households who think it’s a good time to buy a major household item plummeted 67 points to -51% (18% thinking it’s a good time outweighed by 69% thinking it’s a bad time).
- Even when retailers are able to reopen their shops, they’re going to find the going very tough, with job security front of mind for consumers.
The ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Index fell off a cliff in April, in the first read since lockdown.
Turning to the detail:
- Consumers’ perceptions of their current financial situation fell 16 points. A net 4% feel financially worse off than a year ago (28% better, 31%worse). This number falls into the “could have been worse” category and likely reflects the shielding effect of the wage subsidy scheme.
- A net 14% of consumers expect to be better off financially this time next year, down only 3 points.
- Yet extreme wariness is evident in the fact that a net 51% think it’s a bad time to buy a major household item, down 92 points in two months.
- Perceptions regarding the next year’s economic outlook dropped another 17 points to a net 56% expecting conditions to worsen, the lowest since the data began in 2004. This series is most correlated with business confidence. The five-year outlook fell only 5 points to +20%.
- House price inflation expectations fell sharply from 4.6% to just 0.5%, with falls in every region, and Wellington and Canterbury mildly negative. Inflation expectations eased 0.2%pts to 3.2%.
New Zealand consumers are feeling pretty alarmed. Times have changed rapidly – job security is iffy or non-existent for many, the value of their largest asset is looking like flat-lining (figure 2), and the world is suddenly a highly uncertain place. Figure 3 suggests plans are currently to keep wallets firmly shut, even once bricks and mortar retail and sit-down dining reopens.
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Related Research Reports
The latest Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Monthly Report is available on the Roy Morgan Online Store. It provides demographic breakdowns for Age, Sex, State, Region (Capital Cities/ Country), Generations, Lifecycle, Socio-Economic Scale, Work Status, Occupation, Home Ownership, Voting Intention, Roy Morgan Value Segments and more.
You can also view our monitor of Quarterly New Zealand Unemployment & Under-employment Estimates.
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Margin of Error
The margin of error to be allowed for in any estimate depends mainly on the number of interviews on which it is based. Margin of error gives indications of the likely range within which estimates would be 95% likely to fall, expressed as the number of percentage points above or below the actual estimate. Allowance for design effects (such as stratification and weighting) should be made as appropriate.
| Sample Size | Percentage Estimate |
| 40% – 60% | 25% or 75% | 10% or 90% | 5% or 95% | |
| 1,000 | ±3.0 | ±2.7 | ±1.9 | ±1.3 |
| 5,000 | ±1.4 | ±1.2 | ±0.8 | ±0.6 |
| 7,500 | ±1.1 | ±1.0 | ±0.7 | ±0.5 |
| 10,000 | ±1.0 | ±0.9 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 |
| 20,000 | ±0.7 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 |
| 50,000 | ±0.4 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 | ±0.2 |
