China retail sales, industrial production growth slowed in October

BEIJING

Retail sales and factory activity in China slowed last month, official data showed Friday, highlighting the uphill battle facing authorities battling a persistent consumer malaise in the world's second-largest economy.

Beijing has been confronted with sluggish domestic spending since the end of the Covid pandemic, with a prolonged debt crisis in the property sector weighing on sentiment.

Many economists argue that China must shift to a growth model driven more by consumption than infrastructure investment and exports, long the key sources of activity.

Leaders are targeting overall growth in 2025 of five percent, a goal experts say remains within reach despite an apparent slowdown in the latter half of the year.

"External instability and uncertainty factors remain numerous, domestic structural adjustment pressures are significant, and the stable operation of the economy faces many challenges," Fu Linghui, chief economist at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), told a news conference Friday.

Retail sales rose 2.9 percent on-year last month, data from the NBS showed, slightly lower than the three percent increase recorded in September.

The figure marked the fifth straight month of slowing growth since the peak of 6.4 percent reached in May.

The slower spending last month came as Beijing and Washington worked to ease a damaging trade war, with presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreeing at an October 30 meeting in South Korea to a one-year truce.

China's exports have largely remained resilient this year despite Washington's tariffs, with a decline in shipments to the United States offset by increases elsewhere, particularly Southeast Asia.

But spurring activity in the domestic economy has been more challenging.

At a key gathering of the ruling Communist Party last month focused on economic planning, leaders said the country must "vigorously boost consumption".

Moody's Ratings warned in a report this week that China's "domestic demand may be slow to revive".

After last month's meeting, priorities are "accelerating innovation in strategic technologies and reinforcing domestic demand through structural improvements in income distribution and social safety nets", the report said.

  Factory slowdown 

NBS data also showed factory activity in October fell short of expectations.

Industrial production rose 4.9 percent year-on-year, lower than a Bloomberg forecast of 5.5 percent and the slowest increase since August last year.

"A key drag came from weaker external demand — export values and industrial sales for export both weakened significantly," Zichun Huang of Capital Economics said in a note about Friday's data.

"We expect the economy to remain weak over the coming quarter," she wrote, adding that Beijing's recent trade truce with Washington "is unlikely to provide much relief".

China's real estate sector has been mired in a debt crisis since 2020, having enjoyed a decades-long construction boom powered by rapid urbanisation and rising living standards.

Friday data showed home values — a key store of wealth for Chinese households — continued to decline.

Prices for new residential properties fell year-on-year in October in 61 out of 70 major cities surveyed by the NBS.

In another worrying sign for policymakers, fixed-asset investment in the January-October period was down 1.7 percent year-on-year.

The indicator slipped into negative territory in September, falling 0.5 percent year-on-year.

The latest drop "reflects the weak property sector investment as well as lacklustre infrastructure investment", wrote Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, in a note.

Zhang added that because China appears to be "on track" to achieve the five percent annual growth target, stimulus measures before the end of the year are not expected.