Electronic Card Transactions: August 2016
Embargoed until 10:45am – 09 September 2016

Key facts
Changes in the seasonally adjusted value of transactions for August 2016 (compared with July 2016)
were:




Total electronic card transactions fell 0.8 percent.
Transactions in the retail industries fell 0.4 percent.
Transactions in the core retail industries fell 0.6 percent.

Liz MacPherson, Government Statistician
ISSN 1178-0258
9 September 2016

 Commentary
All figures are seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified.
Values are only available at the national level, and are not adjusted for price changes.
In the retail industries, the value of electronic card spending was down 0.4 percent in August
2016, following a 0.2 percent rise in July 2016.
Five of the six retail industries had decreases, while one remained unchanged in August
2016. The biggest falls were from the hospitality industry, down $14 million (1.5 percent), and the
consumables industry, down $8.1 million (0.5 percent).

The total value of electronic card spending, including the two non-retail industries (non-retail
excluding services and services), was down 0.8 percent in August. This follows a 0.3 percent rise
in July 2016.
The two non-retailing industries were also down for August 2016. The non-retail (excluding
services) industry was down $29 million (2.0 percent) and the services industry was down $4.4
million (1.7 percent).
Core retail spending (which excludes the vehicle-related industries) fell 0.6 percent in August
2016, after a 0.6 percent rise in July.

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 Trends for the total, retail, and core retail series have generally been rising since these series
began in October 2002, but appear to be easing now.
In actual terms, card-holders made 131 million transactions across all industries in August 2016,
with an average value of $49. The total amount spent across all transactions was $6.4 billion.
For more detailed data see the Excel tables in the 'Downloads' box.

Imputation of missing data
As outlined in Electronic Card Transactions: January 2016, Statistics NZ has imputed for some
missing data for the durables industry. As we are still unable to source this missing data, we will
continue to impute for this data until a supplier is confirmed.

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 Related links
Next release
Electronic Card Transactions: September 2016 will be released on 11 October 2016.
Subscribe to information releases, including this one, by completing the online subscription form.
The release calendar lists all information releases by date of release.

Past releases
Electronic Card Transactions has links to past releases.

Data quality
Electronic Card Transactions data collection methodology – DataInfo+
General methodology used to produce electronic card transaction statistics.
Electronic Card Transactions concepts – DataInfo+
Definitions of terms used in this release.
Principles and protocols for producers of Tier 1 statistics
Statistics in this release have been produced in accordance with the Official Statistics System
principles and protocols for producers of Tier 1 statistics for quality. They conform to the
Statistics NZ Methodological Standard for Reporting of Data Quality.

Related information
The latest movements in related series were as follows:




The food price index fell 0.2 percent in July 2016, compared with June 2016.
The consumers price index rose 0.4 percent in the June 2016 quarter, compared with
the March 2016 quarter.
Credit card billings in New Zealand, as published by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand,
were down 0.4 percent in July 2016, compared with July 2015.

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 Contacts
For media enquiries contact:
Neil Kelly
Christchurch 03 964 8957
Email: info@stats.govt.nz
For technical information contact:
Madu Weera 03 964 8459
Email: info@stats.govt.nz
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Email: info@stats.govt.nz
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 Tables
See the following Excel tables in the 'Downloads' box on this page. If you have problems viewing
the files, see opening files and PDFs.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Electronic card transactions by industry – actual monthly values
Electronic card transactions by industry – seasonally adjusted monthly values
Electronic card transactions by industry – trend monthly values
Electronic card transactions – number of transactions
Electronic card transactions – averages and proportions

A machine-readable zipped CSV file is also available in the 'Downloads' box.

Access more data on Infoshare
Infoshare allows you to organise data in the way that best meets your needs. You can view the
resulting tables onscreen or download them.
Use Infoshare
For this release, select the following category from the Infoshare homepage:
Subject category: Economic indicators
Group: Electronic Card Transactions (ANZSIC06) – ECT

Next release
Electronic Card Transactions: September 2016 will be released on 11 October 2016.

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