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
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
High above the sparkling surface of the Athens coastline, the cranes for building the 50-floor luxury tower centerpiece of Greece’s future “smart city” look out over the Saronic Gulf. At their feet, construction machinery stirs up dust. Its backers say the 8 billion euro (US$8.43 billion) project financed by private funds is a symbol of Greece’s renaissance after the years of financial stagnation that saw investors flee the country. However, critics see it more as a future “ghetto for the rich.” It is hard to imagine that 10km from the Acropolis, a new city “three times the size of Monaco”
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
In a red box factory that stands out among the drab hills of the West Bank, Chat Cola’s employees race to quench Palestinians’ thirst for local products since the Gaza war erupted last year. With packaging reminiscent of Coca-Cola’s iconic red and white aluminum cans, Chat Cola has tapped into Palestinians’ desire to shun brands perceived as too supportive of Israel. “The demand for [Chat Cola] increased since the war began because of the boycott,” owner Fahed Arar said at the factory in the occupied West Bank town of Salfit. Julien, a restaurateur in the city of Ramallah further south,
RSS