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SpendingPulse: Total U.S. Retail Sales for January Up 5.5% Year-over-Year

Dépèche transmise le 14 février 2011 par Business Wire

SpendingPulse: Total U.S. Retail Sales for January Up 5.5% Year-over-Year

PURCHASE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MasterCard Advisors:

MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, a macroeconomic report tracking national retail and service sales, today provided summary results for January 2011. Excluding auto sales, total retail sales grew by 5.5% year-over-year, on par with December’s growth rate, and slightly higher than November’s. Strong sales also led to a rebound in shorter-term growth -- on a month-to-month seasonally adjusted basis, January sales were up by 1.8%, reversing the slowdown that month-to-month sales had posted in December. Excluding both auto sales and gasoline, on a seasonally unadjusted basis, year-over-year sales in January grew by 4.6%, slightly slower than November and December, 2010, but nevertheless a healthy rate of growth by most standards.

Kamalesh Rao, Director of Economic Research for MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, noted: “Overall, retail spending managed to maintain its momentum following an already-strong holiday season. Despite some very challenging weather conditions in many parts of the country, and unemployment numbers that have not yet improved significantly, during the last two months we saw the strongest growth rate for total U.S. retail sales ex-autos since April 2010. Further, the year-to-year growth for 3-month totals stood at 4.9% in January, the highest growth rate since August 2007.”

To watch a short video with additional commentary from Kamalesh Rao, please visit: http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/us/advisors/en/information_analytics/spendingpulse_podcast.html

Sectors showing positive results in January included eCommerce, Luxury, Apparel and Travel, both in the Airlines and Lodging categories. Weaker segments included Jewelry, Furniture and Automotive Repair & Maintenance.

Spending grew in every part of the country, with the best unadjusted year-over-results in the South Central and Southeast regions respectively posting 9.7% and 7.7% growth.

About MasterCard Advisors

MasterCard Advisors provides payments consulting, information, analytics, and customized services to financial institutions and their merchant partners worldwide. Addressing complex challenges in strategy, marketing, risk, and operations, MasterCard Advisors helps clients maximize the value of their payments businesses. As the professional services arm of MasterCard Worldwide, MasterCard Advisors is uniquely qualified to provide clients with insights and solutions that drive tangible impact and financial gain. For more information, go to www.mastercardadvisors.com.

About MasterCard Worldwide

As a leading global payments company, MasterCard Worldwide prides itself on being at the heart of commerce, helping to make life easier and more efficient for everyone, everywhere. MasterCard serves as a franchisor, processor and advisor to the payments industry, and makes commerce happen by providing a critical economic link among financial institutions, governments, businesses, merchants, and cardholders worldwide. In 2010, $2.7 trillion in gross dollar volume was generated on its products by consumers around the world. Powered by the MasterCard Worldwide Network – the fastest payment processing network in the world – MasterCard processes over 23 billion transactions each year and has the capacity to handle 140 million transactions per hour, with an average network response time of 140 milliseconds and with 99.99 percent reliability. MasterCard advances global commerce through its family of brands, including MasterCard®, Maestro®, and Cirrus®; its suite of core products such as credit, debit, and prepaid; and its innovative platforms and functionalities, such as MasterCard PayPass™ and MasterCard inControl™. MasterCard serves consumers, governments, and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. For more information, please visit us at www.mastercard.com. Follow us on Twitter: @mastercardnews.