A Chinese services-industry index declined to a six-month low last month, dragged down by a weaker property market.
The non-manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 54.2 from 55 in June, the Beijing-based National Bureau of Statistics and China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing said in Beijing yesterday.
A reading of more than 50 indicates expansion.
The report highlights the danger a correction in the property market poses to growth in the world’s second-biggest economy and contrasts with a Chinese government report last week that showed manufacturing expanded at the fastest pace in more than two years.
REAL-ESTATE RISK
The IMF’s China mission head said last week that real estate is the biggest near-term risk to the Chinese economy.
“Real estate continued to soften, reflecting a thin market in the low season, while the range of price discounting widened,” Cai Jin (蔡瑾), a vice chairman at the logistics federation, said in the statement.
“The decline in the index isn’t large and overall, markets are stable,” he added.
A gauge of business expectations in the survey rose to 61.5 last month from 60.4 in June, the report showed.
Services accounted for 46.6 percent of Chinese GDP in the first half of the year, 1.3 percentage points higher than the same period a year earlier, the statistics bureau said last month when it released GDP data for the last quarter.
Expansion in services quickened to 8 percent in the first half from 7.8 percent in the first quarter, and compared with a 7.4 percent pace in manufacturing, mining and construction industries, the statistics bureau’s data showed.
INDEX BASIS
The non-manufacturing index produced by the two agencies is based on responses from purchasing managers at 1,200 Chinese companies in 27 industry groups, including catering, retailing, construction and transportation.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by