China's major retailers see robust sales growth

NANJING - China's top 100 retailers saw combined sales jump 26.2 percent year on year to 3.37 trillion yuan ($544 billion) in 2014, an industry association official said Thursday.

Wang Yao, vice president of China General Chamber of Commerce, said at an expo held in the eastern city of Kunshan that the annual growth rate for leading retailers was 6.4 percentage points higher than in 2013 due to the explosion of e-commerce.

Online sales soared 110 percent to 1.1 trillion yuan and online-sales growth contributed to 82.7 percent of sales growth for the 100 retailers, said Wang.

Sales at their physical stores only grew 5.6 percent year on year, he added.

Alibaba's Tmall.com was the largest with an annual sales of 763 billion yuan, while Suning and JD.com ranked the second and third.

Tmall.com ranked top for the second straight year after beating Suning in 2013.

Due to weak sales at physical stores, the threshold for the top 100 retailers fell 410 million yuan to 3.56 billion yuan, said Wang.