No. 156 / Mar 7, 2022
Members of Generation Z are called “Digital natives” because they have been familiar with digital and mobile devices since childhood. Currently, this generation comprises individuals from 11 to 28 years old in 2022 who are receiving a lot of attention in the economic market because they are the main players of consumption. It is expected that many of the students who read this article will also belong to Generation Z.
Even though they are young, Generation Z is interested in investment techniques. According to the 2021 Generation Z Trend Report by Open Survey, a corporate survey agency, approximately 43% of Generation Z who participated in the survey said they were interested in investment techniques, an increase of 15.3% from the previous year. The reason for this interest is presumed to be, first, interest rates on financial instruments failed to keep up with prices, and second, COVID-19 encouraged people to earn money without working. Most of Generation Z now recognizes that the real estate market has become polarized and they cannot buy a house easily even if they earned money for an entire lifetime.
What then are Generation Z’s investment techniques? First, in the aforementioned survey, Generation Z’s current investment technique rankings included savings (48.6%), app-tech (41.7%), stocks (36.9%), and resell-tech (32.6%), followed by virtual currency (13.6%), real estate (1.9%), and funds (1.1%). Of the respondents, 22.8% said they had never experienced investing. It should be noted here that more than half of Generation Z has experienced investment techniques and they utilize various investment techniques, not just deposits and installment savings.
Meanwhile, 41.7% of Generation Z respondents used app-tech, and 32.6% used resell-tech. This reflects the characteristics of Generation Z, or “Digital natives”, because app-tech and resell-tech mainly use mobile applications as a platform. In app-tech, people collect points through the application in various ways (such as watching advertisements, participating in surveys, and walking) and use them in real life like real currency. In resell-tech, people purchase limited or rare products through an application that allows them to purchase them at low prices and then re-sell them on a trading application. Resell-tech is famous for trading shoes. In addition, the concept of “Piece investment” has recently begun to emerge. As the age of starting investment techniques decreases, a small number of people are gathering in small amounts to engage in financial technology.
The purpose of investment among Generation Z is to obtain economic freedom, and some experts suggest that frustration and anger over this process can appear to be an aggressive investment. By contrast, other experts say that Generation Z considers investment a place of fair competition, because they believe that investment offers equal opportunities once they have learned how to do it. Thus, experts predict that Generation Z is expected to invest actively and aggressively. Let us look forward to a future economic market in which Generation Z actively applies various investment techniques, even in small amounts, using digital and mobile devices.
By Noh Hyun-jin, AG Reporter
noh0605@ajou.ac.kr
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