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On March 5, China released its series of development targets for 2022 including the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth at about 5.5% on year, and all these have clearly confirmed the pressure that the world's second largest economy expects to feel in softening demand, increasing supply and weakening market sentiment, as Beijing has reminded ever since the start of this year.
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In the first week after the Chinese New Year (CNY) break, China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has been busy with stabilizing the prices of a few industrial and agricultural products such as iron ore, coal and pork.
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China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a series of posts on the performance of the country's various industrial sectors including steel, nonferrous metals and some downstream industries such as shipbuilding and machinery manufacturing on January 30, which provided a glimpse of the pressure the downstream industries withstood last year mainly from the soaring costs in their raw materials.
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The years before 2010 China would have been exhilarated at its annual auto sales exceeding 15 million units, considering it a spectacular milestone, while by 2021, the country had topped the world for the 13th year in auto sales with the volume at 26.27 million units, according to the latest data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).
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With the second COVID-19-struck year having come to an end globally, a brief review of the performances in China's manufacturing sector and the steel industry alone over 2020-2021 shows that the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for the former had been in expansion except for February 2020 and September-October 2021, while that for the latter had been in contraction except for an expansion in May 2020, which may be surprising to some market participants.
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China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has publicized the detailed draft guidelines for related regulatory bodies to effectively scrutinize the operations of pricing index providers of key commodities so as to "nurture an orderly and healthy development for such pricing indices", according to a notice shared by NDRC's Department of Price on October 25.
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Nowadays, sustainability in the ferrous world has one more dimension, that of the big “C”, as in “carbon”, and many countries including those in the European Union, U.S., Australia, and China have been urging their ferrous industrial enterprises to pursue decarbonization goals. Their domestic companies are also taking their own initiatives to minimize their carbon footprints.
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It is always like a treasure hunt for me whenever reading a company’s annual report, as behind all those hard and straightforward numbers, there is always an interesting story to tell and a glimpse of the company’s development strategy based on its understanding of the future, and this is exactly how I feel when flipping through BHP’s 81-page report on its full-year results for FY2021.
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It has been a known fact that China has been promoting hard the sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs) and more eco-friendly and energy-saving models, but it has not occurred to me how thorough China’s related governing bodies can be to ascertain that those qualified models are rightfully granted tax reliefs or waivers while leaving no loopholes for the other vehicles that are not up to the standards to abuse the benefits.
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China’s power supply has been under serious test since the start of 2021, firstly in winter because of the extremely cold weather in some regions together with the surging power consumption in many industrial sectors as a result of heavy government spending and fixed asset investments to cushion the domestic economy from the blow of the COVID-19.
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China released all its key economic development data for the first half of 2021 by last week, and related governing organizations also held press conferences to explain the key points of the data on the day of releases where senior officials emphasized the country’s economic growth had been further optimized and is heading towards the desired track via the heavy reliance on the country’s huge domestic market.
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Two friends in Beijing shared their pictures taken in the deserted Shougang steelworks in Shijingshan, on the outskirts of western Beijing, through WeChat Moments recently. No one in the Chinese steel industry would have foreseen ten years before that the site could have turned into a local tourism spot with all the long-deserted blast furnaces clearly seen in the background of pictures.
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Home is where parents are in the Chinese culture. But for this year’s Chinese New Year celebrations, many Chinese working in cities or in other countries away from their places of birth will probably have to bear the separation from their parents for CNY for the first time this year, and all for a common reason – the COVID-19 virus. For the unluckier ones, this might even be the second time they’ll miss their annual family get-together.
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In the first eight months of 2020, China imported more energy products such as crude oil,natural gas and coal,according to the latest statistics from the country’s General Administration of Customs published on September 7, and the slowing global economy had sent prices lower.
For crude oil, China imported 368 million tonnes
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All of a sudden on June 3, WeChat and various Chinese news media became flooded with reports about the possible explosive reincarnation of street/night/flea markets across China – informal commercial venues that Beijing has been regulating for the past few years – and some companies seen as benefiting, such as manufacturers of vans capable of converting into mobile stalls, saw their stock prices spike the same day.
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March 25 was the date when Hubei in Central China returned to the national connection network with the gradual resumption of its road, rail and air transportation. For the prior two months since January 23, the province had been in lockdown starting from Wuhan, the epicentre of the COVID-19, to prevent the contagion spreading nationwide.
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January 31 was supposed to be the day when most Chinese employees would have returned to work, happy and refreshed, after the official holiday over January 24-30 for the Chinese New Year (CNY) celebrations. Not for 2020, though, as Beijing has announced that the holiday will be extended until February 2.
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It is rather interesting to see different interpretations inside and out of China whenever the world’s second largest economy releases economic-related figures, and its latest foreign trade release for the first eight months of 2019 has been a vivid example.
