Private sector growth in the eurozone has slowed to the weakest in almost a year as volatility in financial markets highlighted risks to economic growth, Markit Economics said yesterday.
A purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for manufacturing and services fell to 53.5 this month from 54.3 last month, the London-based company said.
That was the lowest level since February last year. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.
With a cooling Chinese economy sending global markets tumbling and exacerbating an oil crash that is damping consumer price gains, the European Central Bank (ECB) is considering more stimulus as early as March.
A year after announcing an unprecedented quantitative easing plan, and a month after extending that program while making the deposit rate more negative, ECB President Mario Draghi is still struggling to lift inflation in the region above zero.
“The cooling in the pace of growth in euro area business activity at the start of 2016 is a disappointment, but not surprising given the uncertainty caused by the financial market volatility seen so far this year,” Markit chief economist Chris Williamson said.
However, “it would be wrong to get too worried,” he added.
The PMI still points to growth of 0.3 percent to 0.4 percent at the start of the year, he said.
A continued increase in new orders in both manufacturing and services boosted backlogs of uncompleted work to the highest in about four-and-a-half years, prompting firms to hire more staff.
“With plenty of orders in hand to work through, hiring remained encouragingly resilient at the start of the year,” Williamson said.
Lower oil prices “will also help boost sales, especially as the fall in households’ fuel bills should free up more income to spend on other goods and services,” he added.
Within the eurozone, German manufacturers and service providers shrugged off uncertainty stemming from turbulence in financial markets as new orders increased, Markit said.
While the PMI for both industries fell to 54.5 from 55.5 last month, the weakest in three months, it still signaled “robust” growth, Markit said.
“Germany’s private sector economy was largely unaffected by the recent stock-market turmoil,” Markit economist Oliver Kolodseike said. “Companies should remain in expansion mode in coming months. New orders continued to rise strongly and employment was raised at a healthy rate as capacity pressures continued to build.”
Meanwhile, a rebound in French services activity drove a pickup in private sector growth in the eurozone’s second-largest economy this month, with the PMI for the industry rising to 50.6 from 49.8 last month, Markit said.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained