China's industrial output and retail sales growth accelerated in August, government statistics showed today, with both of them exceeding expectations in encouraging signs for the world's second-largest economy.
Industrial production rose 6.3 per cent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said, faster than July's 6.0 per cent and above the median forecast of 6.2 per cent in a Bloomberg News poll of economists.
Retail sales, a key measure of consumer spending, rose 10.6 per cent in August, the NBS said, also ahead of expectations and the July figure.
Beijing is looking to retool the economy from a reliance on investment spending and exports to one driven more by consumer demand, but the transition has proven bumpy and gross domestic product growth has been slowing.
China is a key driver of the world economy but grew at its slowest rate in a quarter of a century last year, and has decelerated further since then.
"In August... Some indicators picked up, efforts of cutting overcapacity, reducing inventory, deleveraging, lowering costs and strengthening weak links achieved notable results," said NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun.
"The national economy has achieved moderate but steady and sound development," he added, but urged caution.
"We must be aware that the domestic and external economic conditions are still complicated and severe with many instabilities and uncertainties," he said.
Fixed asset investment, a gauge of infrastructure spending, was up 8.1 per cent in the first eight months of the year, matching the figure for the January-July period.
Retail sales beat expectations of 10.2 per cent in a Bloomberg News poll of economists, while fixed asset investment was ahead of the 7.9 per cent estimate.
Online retail sales rose 26.7 per cent in the first eight months of the year from the same period in 2015, dwarfing the 10.3 per cent growth in overall retail sales and accounting for 11.6 per cent of the total.
But analysts were cautious about August's figures, and investors gave them a lukewarm response, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index ending just 0.05 per cent higher.
"Today's data fits with our long-running view that the delayed impact of earlier policy easing means that a stronger second half to this year is likely," Julian Evans-Pritchard, China economist at Capital Economics, said in a note.
But he said that further monetary easing was "unlikely in the near-term", so that "this uptick in economic activity is likely to fizzle out going into next year".
Beijing has listed reducing overcapacity and excess inventory and cutting down borrowing as top priorities, with the country's ailing steel industry,accused by US and European rivals of dumping on world markets, a key target.
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