China’s home prices fell last month in more than half of the 70 cities monitored by the government, with only three cities recording gains as the country maintained curbs on the property market.
Prices fell in 45 cities last month compared with January, while 22 cities were unchanged, the National Statistics Bureau said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. That compares with 47 cities recording a decline in January. New home prices in the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou dropped for a fifth month.
Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said last week China’s home prices remain far from a reasonable level and he called on the government to continue efforts to regulate the housing sector. Relaxing the curbs could cause “chaos” in the market, Wen said. China’s two-year campaign to rein in home prices has included measures such as higher down payments and mortgage rates, and home purchase restrictions in 40 cities.
“With more supply coming in spring, prices will fall further,” said Lan Shen, a Shanghai-based economist at Standard Chartered PLC. “There will not be a total reversal of the government’s tightening policies this year and any sort of policy fine-tuning will have a limited impact on the market.”
Only the northern city of Baotou, the eastern city of Jinan and northwestern city of Xining posted gains of 0.1 percent in home prices. In January, no city posted gains for the first time since the government began releasing data at the start of last year for the 70 cities, instead of a national average.
Among major cities, new home prices in Beijing fell 0.1 percent last month from January, while prices dropped by 0.2 percent in Shanghai. The southern business hubs of Guangzhou and Shenzhen both declined by 0.2 percent.
The eastern city of Wenzhou posted the biggest drop for the fourth month, with home prices declining by 0.5 percent from January and 8 percent from last year, according to the statistics bureau. A credit squeeze on smaller businesses in the city prompted Premier Wen to visit in October and pledge financial aid.
Today’s figures came after private data also showed the housing market continued to cool. China’s home prices last month posted the biggest decline in 19 months, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd, the nation’s biggest real-estate Web site owner.
New home prices fell in 27 out of 70 cities last month from a year earlier, government data showed yesterday.
China Vanke Co (萬科集團), the country’s largest publicly traded developer, said contracted sales in the first two months fell 27 percent from a year earlier, while they slumped 31 percent at Poly Real Estate Co (保利地產), the second-biggest developer traded on Chinese exchanges.
Anna Bhobho, a 31-year-old housewife from rural Zimbabwe, was once a silent observer in her home, excluded from financial and family decisionmaking in the deeply patriarchal society. Today, she is a driver of change in her village, thanks to an electric tricycle she owns. In many parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, women have long been excluded from mainstream economic activities such as operating public transportation. However, three-wheelers powered by green energy are reversing that trend, offering financial opportunities and a newfound sense of importance. “My husband now looks up to me to take care of a large chunk of expenses,
SECTOR LEADER: TSMC can increase capacity by as much as 20 percent or more in the advanced node part of the foundry market by 2030, an analyst said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to lead its peers in the advanced 2-nanometer process technology, despite competition from Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, TrendForce Corp analyst Joanne Chiao (喬安) said. TSMC’s sophisticated products and its large production scale are expected to allow the company to continue dominating the global 2-nanometer process market this year, Chiao said. The world’s largest contract chipmaker is scheduled to begin mass production of chips made on the 2-nanometer process in its Hsinchu fab in the second half of this year. It would also hold a ceremony on Monday next week to
TECH CLUSTER: The US company’s new office is in the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City, a new AI industry base and cybersecurity hub in southern Taiwan US chip designer Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) yesterday launched an office in Tainan’s Gueiren District (歸仁), marking a significant milestone in the development of southern Taiwan’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry, the Tainan City Government said in a statement. AMD Taiwan general manager Vincent Chern (陳民皓) presided over the opening ceremony for the company’s new office at the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City (沙崙智慧綠能科學城), a new AI industry base and cybersecurity hub in southern Taiwan. Facilities in the new office include an information processing center, and a research and development (R&D) center, the Tainan Economic Development Bureau said. The Ministry
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
RSS