Fynsa
If you are fixed like me, you will have noticed that, during the last time, there has been an increase in the number of patents of Argentine nationality circulating in our streets. Also Teslas, although we will not refer to that in this opportunity.
The point is that this situation reminds us more or less of 2016, a year in which we also received many visits from our neighbors on the other side of the mountain range. You are probably already guessing where this column is going, but it is not that it is in my interest to discover a phenomenon, but rather to put numbers to it.
The last months of 2024 showed a dynamism in consumption that we had not observed during the rest of the year. With a weak labor market, fewer people working and wages that had been slowing down, it was difficult to explain the rebound in trade sales without an improvement in the income or wealth of national households. And why not, if the explanation did not seem to lie there.
To give an order of magnitude, during January 2025, just under 850 thousand tourists entered the country, of different nationalities and through different points of entry. This number represented an increase of 67% over the same month of the previous year. However, of the total, 518 thousand were Argentineans, which meant an interannual growth of 152%. In any case, this is not just a one-month phenomenon, since, in December 2024, this growth was over 130%, a trend that had already started in September and consolidated in the fourth quarter.
With this on the table, let's see what has happened with trade sales, particularly retail sales published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), since we have its decomposition, which is interesting for this analysis. In that sense, we can notice that the growth within the item has not been homogeneous, which again reminds us of the episode surrounding 2016.
On the one hand, electronic and technological products, clothing, footwear and accessories, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals and cosmetics appear as the big winners, with year-on-year increases exceeding 10%. However, sales of new vehicles, construction materials, beverages and tobacco, and foodstuffs show less momentum, with smaller increases versus last year, and even declines.
It would seem that the goods that are more attributable only to consumption by nationals (due to their characteristics) are as stagnant as the local labor market, while those that have been able to receive that external "impulse" show better results.
The close of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 have been much better than we projected, most likely thanks to this unexpected stimulus. However, we know that this should not be permanent, but should be focused during the summer months and then tapering off. However, perhaps it will be enough to give a better taste in our mouths to the mediocre growth that has accompanied us in recent years. Moreover, we put an upward bias on our projection for 2025, which stands at 2.3%.
