The awards are in: food delivery, gaming the big winners from govt stimulus

The stats are in: food delivery is what Australians are spending their stimulus money on.

Coming in number two are apps, music and gaming.

An analysis of where Australian’s have spent their stimulus money, specifically the $750 one-off coronavirus payment given to people on a range of different benefits, shows these are the industries that are the direct beneficiaries of government largesse, according to a real-time spending tracker developed by AlphaBeta & illion.

The tracker shows the last two weeks of spending and uses the anonymised banking transaction data of hundreds of thousands of Australians.

1, 2, 3: food delivery, gaming, gambling

The data differentiated between ‘shutdown categories’ which are closed or hard to access such as gyms, public transport, hairdressers, pubs and entertainment, and ‘lockdown categories’ which benefit from Australians stuck at home. Going strong are delivery, online retail, gaming, home improvement, and off-premise alcohol.

Stockhead outlined the main ASX players in gaming and food delivery in late March and early April, with one marketing employee at private company Immutable saying esports thrives on social distancing.

Esports Mogul (ASX:ESH) is the main gaming company on the ASX, now that blockchain game company Animoca has delisted.

Local company Marley Spoon (ASX:MMM) is the most direct way to invest in food delivery, but Digital Wine Ventures (ASX:DW8) also offers a way to invest in the wine delivery, although it has taken the company a long time to build that business since it pivoted from blockchain wine supply chain logistics into local delivery.

Online gambling was the industry that came in at number three, a sector which includes Jumbo Interactive (ASX:JIN), a company which until October 2019 had been rapidly growing its bank balance and share price.

Australians say ‘no thanks’ to credit

While shares in buy now, pay later companies have sharply come back since the worst of the crisis in early March, total applications for credit including mortgages, credit cards, mobile phone contracts, personal loans and other credit have fallen by 45 per cent.

Credit applications are a sign of consumer confidence and a leading indicator of consumption, as well as being a signal of what to expect in the listed credit space over the coming months.

The data showed that higher income Australians have decreased their discretionary spending by 25 per cent since the crisis began, while little has changed for lower income Australians who have less discretionary spending to cut.

Last week spending was 18 per cent below normal levels, a figure that combines discretionary and essential spending.

Government stimulus arrested a sharp drop in discretionary spending while spending on essentials has see-sawed: it peaked in the first week of the crisis, rising 9 per cent, as people stocked up on groceries, office supplies & hardware; but since moderated.