India’s industrial production rose less than estimated in December, signaling weakening domestic demand as the global recovery faltered.
Output at factories, utilities and mines climbed 1.8 percent from a year earlier, after a 5.9 percent advance in November last year, the Indian Central Statistical Office said in a statement in New Delhi yesterday. The median of 23 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey was for a 2.6 percent gain.
The deterioration in factory output might fan concern that India’s growth is slowing after the government forecast the weakest rise in GDP since 2009.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has signaled its readiness to cut rates and shield the economy if inflation eases further, with a fall in Chinese exports last month underscoring the threat to Asian expansion from Europe’s protracted debt crisis.
“We will have to accept that we are in a slowdown mode and factory output is likely to remain subdued for the first half,” said Arun Singh, a Mumbai-based senior economist at Dun & Bradstreet Information Services India. “Moderating growth and cooling inflation will pave the way for the RBI to reduce interest rates in April.”
Manufacturing gained 1.8 percent in December from a year earlier after a 6.6 percent advance in November, yesterday’s report showed. Electricity output rose 9.1 percent, while mining fell 3.7 percent.
The Indian government on Tuesday predicted GDP would rise 6.9 percent in the 12 months through next month from a year earlier, the lowest level since 2008 to 2009. Asia’s third-largest economy expanded 8.4 percent in the last financial year.
The RBI on Jan. 24 cut the amount of deposits lenders need to set aside as reserves for the first time since 2009, seeking to ease a cash squeeze and bolster expansion.
The central bank reinforced guidance that future rate actions “will be towards lowering them,” while saying inflation risks made it “premature” to start reducing borrowing costs.
The bank kept the repurchase rate at 8.5 percent for a second month, following 3.75 percentage points of increases from March 2010 to October last year to fight inflation.
Asia-Pacific officials are striving to weather the impact of Europe’s debt turmoil. Expansion has eased in countries from China to South Korea, prompting central banks to cut rates or leave them on hold.
Indonesia unexpectedly lowered borrowing costs by a quarter-point this week, while both Australia and South Korea left them unchanged.
In India, businesses have reported slowing output growth. Production at steel companies, including Tata Steel Ltd, India’s largest steelmaker, rose 2.2 percent in December from a year earlier, compared with 5.1 percent in November, government data showed.
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
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
RSS