国际英语新闻:TV shopping moves upmarket to sell high-end products

BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Many television shopping programs have mushroomed in recent years and they are moving upmarket to sell gold, cars and even houses, rather than selling cheap goods.

"It's not like Fifth Avenue. It's more like those (out-of-town) outlets where you get both high quality and a reasonable price," Zhang Dazhong, chairman of Oriental CJ, one of the largest home shopping companies in China, told Monday's China Daily.

Although television shoppers are sensitive to prices, Zhang said they have been paying more attention to quality. The company started in high-end product sales with gold, first five grams, then 10 grams and now even 1,000 grams. It then went into diamond and car sales.

Total transaction volumes of China's television shopping hit 23.4 billion yuan in 2009, according to industry figures. Experts expect the figure will rise to 500 billion yuan by 2020.

China's television shopping faces competition from the country's robust online market and also regulatory controls imposed after fraudulent activity, said Cai Ling, an analyst with research company China Investment Consulting.