Day: September 20, 2020

(Xinhua)15:57, August 03, 2020

Chinas central bank will ramp up efforts to offer financial support for enterprises and ensure employment.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) has stepped up measures including strengthening counter-cyclical policies, keeping liquidity reasonable and deferring loan and interest repayments for micro, small and medium firms, PBOC governor Yi Gang said at a recent symposium.

Having learned about the implementation of supportive policies and difficulties of enterprises, Yi called for innovation in financial services, and better protecting market entities and meeting their new financing demands.

In the meantime, preferential policies must be implemented fully to underpin employment and development of the real economy, Yi said.

In view of the current financing problems of small and micro enterprises, Yi urged departments of the PBOC to conduct in-depth research and improve the relevance and effectiveness of monetary and credit policies.

(Peoples Daily Online)14:14, August 03, 2020

The construction of new infrastructure including 5G and data centers has been picking up speed in China, fuelled by a surge in demand for telecommuting, online entertainment, and voice and video call services.

Photo shows a scene of a data center of Chindata Group. (Photo/People鈥檚 Daily)

Several companies have announced plans to scale up their data centers. Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba will invest 200 billion yuan (about $28.7 billion) in the construction of data centers and other projects, while Baidu, the leading search engine in China, plans to have 5 million servers in place in 10 years.

In July, Chinese internet giant Tencent started offering services from its data center, which can house more than 1 million servers, located in Qingyuan, south China鈥檚 Guangdong province.

With the rapid development of the digital economy, the trend of building large big data centers in the country is becoming more obvious. Data shows that the number of ultra-large-scale and large data centers accounted for 12.7 percent of the total data centers in China in 2019.

Due to the lack of scalability of traditional data centers, the next generation will be on-demand in the digital era.

The new generation of data centers should be standard, modular, intelligent, green and safe, according to Zhang Chunming, an associate researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Modular means that a data center can be built with prefabricated modules such as temperature control and IT modules, just like building with Lego blocks, Zhang added.

The modular data center solution can drastically save on time and construction costs. It takes just six months to build a data center using prefabricated modules, compared to 18 months with the traditional construction model. For example, the prefabricated modular data center of Huawei Cloud, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, in Guangdong鈥檚 Dongguan was completed in six months. The five-story center has 1,000 standard server cabinets.

The current cloud data centers will be upgraded to intelligent computing centers due to the exponential growth in demand for artificial intelligence computing, which will account for more than 80 percent of future computing.

Experts predict that in five to 10 years, intelligent computing centers will be deployed in key industries and regions on a large scale, which will become the core infrastructure for building a smart society with an intelligent economy.

(Xinhua)09:08, August 04, 2020

Chinas success in controlling the COVID-19 epidemic means the economy is steadily reviving. The following facts and figures indicate how the country is forging ahead in resuming work and production:

— Chinas futures market in July continued to report double-digit growth in both trading volume and turnover, industry data showed Monday.

The trading volume of futures last month stood at 567.65 million lots, with a turnover of 45.42 trillion yuan (about 6.49 trillion U.S. dollars), up 36.77 percent and 55.7 percent from the same period last year, respectively, according to the China Futures Association.

In the first seven months of 2020, the trading volume of the market totaled 3.089 billion lots, an increase of 43.69 percent year on year.

— Chinas internet and related sectors have returned to double-digit growth in business revenue and research development in the first half of this year (H1) amid the COVID-19 epidemic, official data showed.

Major internet companies raked in 590.7 billion yuan in the January-June period, up 14.1 percent year on year, which is 12.6 percentage points higher than the growth rate registered in the first quarter (Q1), according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

In H1, the operating profit of the industry snapped the sharp slump in Q1, rising by 2.8 percent year on year to 52.2 billion yuan.

— China has seen a rapid increase in loans extended to clean energy, environmental protection and other green sectors in the first half of this year as the country puts more emphasis on green development, central bank data showed.

Outstanding green loans in yuan and foreign currencies reached 11.01 trillion yuan by the end of H1, up 10.8 percent from the beginning of the year, according to the Peoples Bank of China.

Outstanding loans for green infrastructure projects totaled 5.28 trillion yuan by the end of June, up 11.1 percent from the beginning of the year, the data showed.

(Xinhua)09:34, August 04, 2020

Taiwans manufacturing activity shifted from contraction to expansion in July, according to the latest purchasing managers index (PMI) reading by the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER) on Monday.

The PMI for July increased by 6.9 percentage points month on month to 51.4 percent after staying in the contraction range for three months, the CIER press release said.

A PMI above 50 suggests expansion, while below 50 means contraction.

Among the five sub-indexes, new orders, production, and employment transformed from contraction to expansion in July, while supplier deliveries continued to expand and inventory levels remained in the contraction range, according to the CIER.

The business outlook index for the next six months climbed by 5.2 percentage points to 49.3 percent, indicating an improving sentiment among manufacturers.

However, CIER President Chang Chuang-chang said that it is too early to say that the Taiwan economy has returned to its normal track since the global economy remained gloomy.

Local manufacturers have been cautious about the future development of the economy with fears of a second wave of COVID-19 outbreaks, Chang said.

For the services sector, the non-manufacturing index (NMI) rose by 3.3 percentage points from the previous month to 57.3 percent in July, according to the CIER.