China’s fixed-asset investment, a main measure of government spending on infrastructure projects, rose by its slowest rate in more than 12 years in the January-to-April period, the Chinese government said yesterday.
Growth in the world’s second-largest economy is decelerating, but leaders in Beijing say they want to wean the country off investment as the key driver of expansion and shift the focus to consumer spending.
Fixed-asset investment rose by 17.3 percent year-on-year in the first four months of the year, slowing from 17.6 percent in the first three months, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.
The figure is only released cumulatively, and the reading was the lowest since the increase for the whole of 2001, when it stood at 13.7 percent, NBS data showed.
It was one of several figures adding to concerns over the weakening of China’s economy, and analysts called on Beijing to ease its monetary policy.
“The pressure for more policy easing continues to build,” Hong Kong-based Nomura economist Zhang Zhiwei (張智威) said in a research note. Industrial output, which measures production at factories, workshops and mines, increased by 8.7 percent year-on-year last month, the NBS said, edging down from 8.8 percent a month earlier.
Retail sales, a gauge of consumer spending, increased by 11.9 percent last month from a year earlier, the NBS added, down from a 12.2 percent rise in March.
GDP grew 7.4 percent year-on-year in the first three months of the year, weaker than the 7.7 percent in October-to-December last year and the worst since a similar 7.4 percent expansion in the third quarter of 2012.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) in March announced a growth target of “around 7.5 percent” for this year.
Yet ANZ analysts Liu Ligang (劉利剛) and Zhou Hao (周浩) said the growth target was unlikely to be achieved without a cut in lending rates, as well as in the amount of money banks must keep in reserve.
“If the government still views that achieving a 7.5 percent growth target is important for its credibility, China’s monetary policy will have to play its necessary role by easing further in order to help pull the economy out of a state of lethargy,” they said in a report.
Last month, China cut the reserve requirement ratio for rural banks by up to 2 percentage points, the first such move since May 2012, when it slashed the ratio to 20 percent for large financial institutions and 16.5 percent for smaller ones.
It has not reduced lending rates since July 2012.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”