China’s consumer deflation extended for a third month last month, as punitive tariffs imposed by the US add to a drag on prices from weak domestic demand.
The consumer price index fell 0.1 percent from a year earlier, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday, similar to the drop in the previous month.
Factory deflation persisted for a 31st month, with the producer price index recording a decline of 2.7 percent compared with 2.5 percent in March.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Deflationary pressures are likely to linger and possibly get worse after US President Donald Trump took aim at most Chinese exports with a 145 percent tariff last month, provoking Beijing to retaliate in kind. The trade war could encourage some companies to offload their products at home, exacerbating already-fierce competition that might push firms to lower prices even further.
“Policy efforts to boost consumption since the fourth quarter of last year still appear to be failing to get much traction,” Bloomberg Economics economist David Qu (曲天石) wrote in a note on Saturday. “The key will be for the government to increase fiscal support quickly — especially if negotiations with the US fail to bring material relief on tariffs.”
Losses in jobs and incomes due to US tariffs might also weaken the ability and willingness of Chinese consumers to spend, likely prompting manufacturers and service providers to cut prices.
China’s economy continued to struggle from deflation in the first first three months of the year, reflecting an imbalance between supply and demand.
The GDP deflator — a broad measure of prices across the economy — declined for the eighth consecutive quarter, the longest streak since the quarterly data began in 1993.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS