China’s new home prices rose last month from a year earlier in all but two of the 70 cities monitored by Beijing, defying property curbs to keep housing affordable.
New home prices in Beijing advanced 6.8 percent last month from last year, while Shanghai climbed 1.5 percent, the statistics bureau said on its Web site yesterday, initiating a new method of calculating prices. Haikou had the biggest gain, surging 21.6 percent, and 10 cities had increases exceeding 10 percent. Housing values in Quanzhou and Nanchong fell.
China extended property curbs last month, including raising the minimum down payment for -second-home purchases, telling local governments to set price -targets on new properties and introduced taxes for residential homes in Shanghai and Chongqing. The central bank raised interest rates on Feb. 8 for the third time in four months.
“The new data clearly shows home prices are still rising and the government curbs only suppressed transaction volumes,” said Jinny Yan (嚴瑾), Shanghai-based economist at Standard Chartered PLC. “The ultimate problem is monetary policy — the government should at least raise interest rates two more times this year because if the liquidity is not tightened, it would be impossible for home prices to fall.”
New home sales in Beijing rose 0.8 percent last month from December and 0.9 percent in -Shanghai. Chongqing is the only city among the 70 that posted a decline from the previous month, dropping 0.1 percent, the statement said.
Existing home prices in Beijing rose 2.6 percent last year from a year earlier, while those in Shanghai added 1.7 percent. Prices of previously owned apartments fell in four of the 70 cities, the government data showed.
“Property prices and sales still remained strong as many buyers dashed into the market ahead of the government curbs,” Du Jinsong (杜勁松), a Hong Kong-based analyst for Credit Suisse Group AG, said before the release yesterday.
China stopped releasing national average property prices and changed the methodology of the survey starting this year, the statistics bureau announced on Wednesday, to more accurately reflect price gains.
The agency will continue to monitor 70 big and medium-sized cities and use online registration data for home transactions for 35 of them, it said. For cities that don’t have online registration systems, the bureau will continue to use figures from local authorities.
“Although property is being targeted with tightening measures, overall credit growth in the economy remains expansionary,” Erwin Sanft, head of China and Hong Kong research at BNP Paribas SA, said in an e-mail. “The memories of the 2008 downturn in exports and housing prices are still too fresh at central and local government level” to create another downturn.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to