China’s economy showed signs of stabilizing last month, with retail sales and factory output beating expectations as a power supply crisis appeared to ease, data released yesterday showed.
The recovery in the world’s second-largest economy has been losing steam for much of the year after a swift bounceback from harsh lockdowns to contain COVID-19, with officials earlier citing an “unstable and uneven” economic rebound.
Power outages in the past few months caused by emission reduction targets, the surging price of coal and supply shortages also affected factory production.
Photo: EPA-EFE
However, industrial production grew 3.5 percent year-on-year last month, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said, as China worked to boost coal production and ease its energy shortage. A survey of economists tipped a 3.0 percent expansion.
NBS spokesman Fu Linghui (傅令輝) said yesterday that the “international environment remains complex and severe” with many uncertainties, adding that China needs to “work harder to maintain economic stability and recovery.”
“While electricity shortages and production cuts hampered output in early October, we don’t think they are a significant problem anymore,” Louis Kuijs of Oxford Economics said yesterday.
He added that this follows “a range of policy measures to boost coal production and lower coal prices.”
However, economic momentum remained weak last month, he said, “with the real estate downturn weighing on industry and a new wave of COVID outbreaks dampening household consumption.”
Retail sales rose 4.9 percent year-on-year last month, far exceeding forecasts for 3.7 percent, the latest data showed.
Yet observers warn that this could be bogged down by recent containment measures, reimposed following a fresh virus outbreak in the middle of last month that has spread to several regions.
Fu said that “domestic tourist numbers and income growth were below pre-pandemic levels” during the golden week holiday at the start of the month.
The urban unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent.
Weakness in the economy is giving the country’s central bank a headache as it must try to nurture a recovery while at the same time keep a lid on inflation, which is at levels not seen since the mid-1990s.
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS