China’s property sector shrank at a faster pace in the final three months of last year as the country’s housing slump continues to take its toll on the economy.
Output in the real-estate sector shrank 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter after a 1.6 percent contraction in the previous three months, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday in a supplemental report on GDP.
That was the first consecutive quarterly decline since 2008.
The construction sector’s output also declined by 2.1 percent during the same period.
Those two sectors combined were 13.8 percent of national output last year, Bloomberg calculations showed, lower than the 14.5 percent in 2020.
Despite authorities’ efforts to ease some restrictions on real-estate funding, China’s property market slump persisted last year, with the downturn spanning developers’ sales, investments, land purchasing and financing activities.
Property investment last month shrank 14 percent from a year earlier, Bloomberg calculations showed. For the full year, it grew 4.4 percent.
China’s economy in the fourth quarter of last year grew at the weakest pace in more than a year, weighed down by the housing slump and weak consumer spending, data released on Monday showed.
GDP expanded 4 percent from a year earlier, down from 4.9 percent in the previous quarter.
The Chinese National Development and Reform Commission said that the country has “relatively plenty” policy tools in reserve to cope with a challenging year ahead and that it would roll out these measures in a timely manner to stabilize growth.
Commission spokesman Yuan Da (袁達) told a news conference that the government would quickly roll out policy measures to boost domestic demand and study targeted measures to bolster industrial production.
The world’s second-largest economy rebounded last year with its best growth in a decade, helped by robust exports, but momentum is slowing on weakening consumption, weighed down by repeated COVID-19 outbreaks and a property downturn.
“We will continue to step up monitoring and forecasting of the economy, and study the policy tools in reserve, and roll out timely, relevant policy measures based on the need from the economic operations to ensure a stable, healthy and sustainable economic development,” Yuan said.
The Chinese central bank on Monday unexpectedly cut the borrowing costs of its medium-term loans for the first time since April 2020, with some market analysts expecting more policy easing this year to cushion an economic slowdown.
Yuan said that the economy faces many challenges this year, including weak consumption, constrained growth in investment and uncertainties in foreign trade, which have led to fluctuations in market expectations and corporate confidence.
The regulator approved 90 fixed-asset investment projects last year, worth a total of 775.4 billion yuan (US$122.20 billion).
Additional reporting by Reuters
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS