Day: July 11, 2020

(Peoples Daily Online)10:17, July 02, 2020

On June 29, a Yiwu-Madrid express train carrying 70 TEU containers of pandemic prevention materials arrived in Madrid, Spain. The goods, including 25.05 million masks and 400,000 sets of protective clothing, weighed 257 tons.

(Photo/Xinhua)

These materials are very valuable. They support us in strengthening epidemic prevention and control and create a safe environment for resumption of production, said the Spanish manager of DSV, a Danish transport and logistics company.

Spain has a rising demand for pandemic prevention materials, and the China-Europe freight train service has obvious advantages in material transportation. It is reliable and convenient, he added.

Wu Haitao, the Chinese ambassador to Spain, said the Yiwu-Madrid express train carrying medical materials is a living proof of international anti-coronavirus cooperation.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the freight trains have been playing a crucial role in supporting Europes anti-pandemic fight by opening green passages for the transport of important supplies and raw materials.

Over the course of the first six months of the year, freight trains have made a total of 294 trips along the Yiwu-Madrid line, carrying 24,466 TEU containers, up 117.1 percent year-on-year.

Carlos Santana, who is responsible for the company operating the Yiwu-Madrid line in Spain, said that railway transport has been proven to be a bridge of strengthening anti-pandemic cooperation, while deepening friendship between the two countries.

(Xinhua)16:35, July 02, 2020

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) — The State Grid Corporation of China said it completed the construction of the power grid program in poverty-stricken regions on Tuesday.

The program has boosted power services for some 17.77 million residents in 198 poor counties in the five provincial-level regions of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet, the company said.

From 2018 to 2020, the firm has completed 7,957 projects with a total investment of 30.4 billion yuan (about 4.31 billion U.S. dollars) in these regions, where the power supply level is close to the national average in the first half of 2020.

It said farmers and herdsmen in poor regions were given the priority to participate in constructing these projects, which created 34,000 new jobs and attracted investment of 223 billion yuan in the construction and equipment manufacturing sectors.

In 2018, China launched a three-year plan to upgrade power grids in the countrys poverty-stricken areas, while all tasks were fulfilled by the end of June, according to the National Energy Administration.

By XianJiangnan (Peoples Daily Online)18:32, June 28, 2020

Screenshot of the report by The Economist

Despite all the dislocations from the coronavirus crisis, China’s manufacturing is still going strong, said The Economist on June 23.

In a report entitled “China is the world’s factory, more than ever”, the author pointed out that Chinese firms are in better shape than most elsewhere amid the coronavirus outbreak, attributing it to China’s “success in slowing the spread of the coronavirus”.

The article said the Canton Fair, though conducted entirely online this year, is a testament to China’s manufacturing muscle. “Some 25,000 exhibitors have hosted live-streams simultaneously, often from their factories, chatting to anyone interested in their products.”

China is home to 28% of the world’s manufacturing—nearly as much as America, Japan and Germany combined—and its manufacturing is still going strong despite all the dislocations from the coronavirus crisis, the report said.

According to the article, China has two big advantages as a manufacturing power. The first advantage is China’s unparalleled industrial base in breadth and depth, “churning out everything from low-end footwear to high-end biotech”.

“Even as wages have steadily increased, China’s combination of manufacturing clusters, first-class infrastructure and upgraded factories have made it more competitive,” the report said.

According to the OECD, in 2005, 26.3% of the value of China’s exports was added abroad; by 2016 that was down to 16.6%, with the share of foreign content falling most sharply in electronics, meaning that “more of the bits and bobs that end up in Chinese gadgets are themselves made in China”.

Citing an example of face masks as a vivid illustration of China’s strengths, the article noted that at the start of February, China made about half the world’s supply, 10m a day. Within a month, output had increased to nearly 120m. “That was not simply through exertion. It was thanks to having ‘the world’s most complete supply chain’,” the report said.

The second advantage for China, it said, is its own vast market. Despite the trade war, global firms look even more wedded to China. According to Rhodium Group, a research firm, during the past 18 months the value of foreign mergers and acquisitions in China reached its highest in a decade.

Even amid the coronavirus outbreak, not only is China’s economy one of the few likely to grow this year; its earlier resumption of industrial activity has allowed exporters to gain market share while most other countries are still in varying states of lockdown, the article noted.

(Xinhua)09:52, June 30, 2020

BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) — As COVID-19 continues to sweep across the world and wreck economic havoc globally, foreign capital continues to flow into China, according to a report compiled by research firm Rhodium Group published Thursday.

While the COVID-19 outbreak has slammed inbound and outbound deal-making this year, flows into China have picked up every month since January. The first five months of 2020 has seen foreign MA (mergers and acquisitions) into China surpassing Chinese outbound MA activities in both volume and value terms for the first time in a decade.

Over the past 18 months, we have recorded levels of foreign MA into China that were not seen in the previous decade, the report said.

According to Rhodium, most of the capital inflows has been driven by American and European firms taking advantage of looser foreign ownership limits or betting on Chinese consumer demand.

The activity is happening at a time when U.S.-China relations are strained.

However, the report said foreign appetite for assets in China will remain robust.

Rhodium researchers also cautioned that reduced foreign direct investment flows will be a global reality for some time and China is no exception.

The COVID-19 pandemic is dragging on international trade, people flows, and cross-border capital movements. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) predicts that global FDI flows could drop up to 40 percent in 2020. China is not an exception and is experiencing diminished capital inflows and outflows, said the report.

(Peoples Daily Online)16:50, June 30, 2020

Profits of China’s industrial enterprises above designated size reached 582.3 billion yuan (about $82.3 billion) in May, marking a 6-percent growth year-on-year and the first positive growth of industrial profits of the country in 2020, suggested data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

An employee operates a mechanical arm for production in the workshop of a manufacturing enterprise in Qingzhou, east China’s Shandong province. (Photo by Wang Jilin/People’s Daily)

In April, the year-on-year growth rate of the profits of the country’s major industrial enterprises decreased by 4.3 percent, according to a monthly report on China’s industrial economic performance released by the NBS on June 28.

The total profits of the country’s industrial companies, with annual revenue of over 20 million yuan, stood at 1,8 trillion yuan in the first five months of the year, dropping by 19.3 percent from the same period of the previous year, disclosed the NBS.

The decline narrowed 8.1 percentage points from that of the first four months, data of the NBS indicated.

Ten of the 41 industrial sectors recorded year-on-year profit growth in the first five months of 2020, while 30 sectors saw decline in their profits, and profits of one sector were at the same level as that of the period last year, the report revealed.

Profits of computer, telecommunications and other electronic equipment manufacturing sectors rose by 34.7 percent year-on-year during the January-May period, while that of farm and sideline food processing industry and special-purpose equipment manufacturing sector grew by 19 percent and 16.6 percent respectively, according to the report.

Certain key sectors witnessed significant profit increases in May, said the report, disclosing that petroleum processing industry logged total profits of 11.6 billion yuan in May, up 8.9 percent from the same period last year, while the whole industry had suffered losses of 21.8 billion yuan in April.

Profits of the electricity sector reported a 10.9-percent growth year-on-year in May, a significant increase from the 15.7-percent decline in April, the report suggested.

As of May 27, 67.4 percent of China’s industrial enterprises above designated size had seen their production capacity reach over 80 percent of the normal levels, 6.6 percentage points more than that in late April, according to an earlier sampling survey conducted by the NBS.

The value-added industrial output of these major industrial enterprises continued to pick up in May after realizing positive growth in April, rising by 4.4 percent year on year, 0.5 percentage points higher than that of the previous month, revealed the survey.

The profit improvement in China’s industrial enterprises mainly resulted from the country’s policies designed to reduce corporate burden, including those on tax and fee cuts, said Liu Xiangdong, deputy head of the economic research department of China Center for International Economic Exchanges.

The drop in prices of imported raw bulk materials has also reduced the pressure of procurement costs for enterprises, Liu told People’s Daily.

With the gradual resumption of domestic consumer market, companies in the country accelerated inventory digestion and made efforts to promote consumer price recovery, which helped increase profits, Liu pointed out.

In addition, benefiting from the introduction of policies and measures on stabilizing domestic and foreign investment, enterprises increased their capital expenditure on investment, which has driven economic recovery and growth in returns on investment, thus leading to profit increase for industrial enterprises, according to Liu.