China’s factory activity shrank for a sixth month in a row in September, official data showed today, as a domestic consumer slump and lingering trade uncertainty weigh on the economy.<\/p>\n
The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) came in at 49.8, narrowly below the value of 50 separating contraction from expansion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).<\/p>\n
The reading was better than the forecast of 49.6 in a Bloomberg survey of economists and was the highest since March.<\/p>\n
But it extended a streak of contraction that began in April, as factories across the manufacturing powerhouse contend with turbulence from the ongoing US-China trade war.<\/p>\n
“Overall economic output expansion in the country accelerated slightly” during the month, said NBS statistician Huo Lihui in a statement.<\/p>\n
The figures come just before the start of the country’s “Golden Week” National Day holiday, a period that usually sees slower factory activity.<\/p>\n
Official data also showed today that the non-manufacturing PMI, which measures activity in sectors including services and construction, fell to 50 in September from 50.3 in August.<\/p>\n
That was short of a Bloomberg forecast of 50.2 and was the lowest since November.<\/p>\n
“Economic momentum is weak in the third quarter,” Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said in a note.<\/p>\n
“Export activities have been surprisingly resilient so far this year and helped to partly offset the weak domestic demand.”<\/p>\n
Consumer prices in China fell in August at their fastest rate for six months, a sign of continuing struggles on that front.<\/p>\n
“Since the GDP growth was above 5% in the first half, the government may tolerate the slowdown in the second half as long as it doesn’t jeopardise the full-year growth target of five percent,” Zhang wrote.<\/p>\n
The recent slump comes as Beijing and Washington work to negotiate a deal to end their bruising trade war, with the world’s top two economies extending a truce on most reciprocal duties to November 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China’s factory activity shrank for a sixth month in a row in September, official data showed today, as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-52443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}