China’s industrial output rose by 8.3 percent last month in a sign that a huge stimulus package is kicking in, Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said in an interview published yesterday.
Last month’s growth accelerated from the 3.8 percent rise in the first two months as domestic demand continued to improve, Wen said, according to the China Securities Journal.
Data on fixed asset investment and retail sales, which measure spending on infrastructure and consumption respectively, also increased quickly in the first quarter, he said in an interview conducted in Thailand at the weekend.
All this showed the economy was performing “better than expected” thanks to Beijing’s measures to tackle the international financial crisis, he said.
China in November unveiled an unprecedented 4 trillion yuan (US$580 billion) stimulus package to ward off the worst effects of the global crisis.
However, Wen warned that the nation’s export-dependent economy was still facing major difficulties because of a sharp contraction in foreign demand, which has placed increasing pressure on employment.
“The international financial crisis has not yet hit the bottom. It’s hard to say that China alone has steered away from the crisis,” he said.
Meanwhile, China’s property prices fell by a record last month and new construction tumbled in the first quarter, dragging down growth.
Real-estate prices in 70 major cities fell 1.3 percent last month from a year earlier, the most since records began in 2005, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. New construction by floor area fell 16.2 percent in the first quarter, it said.
The figures also contained signs that the real estate industry may revive as lending surges and the government implements the stimulus package.
Spending on real estate development grew 4.1 percent in the first quarter, the statistics bureau said.
“Property sales are in an early recovery in major Chinese cities as prices drop to an acceptable range for some buyers,” said Xing Ziqiang (邢自強), an economist at China International Capital Corp (中國國際金融公司) in Beijing. “However, property prices may need to drop another 5 to 10 percent to ensure a sustainable recovery in both sales and property investment.”
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
RSS