China’s economy suffered a huge impact from the novel Coronavirus, numbers for January and February released on Monday revealed.
Amid a widespread shutdown of manufacturing operations, industrial production – a measure of manufacturing, mining and utilities activity – declined 13.5 percent over the first two months of the year, combined data for January and February showed, according to a South China Morning Post report.
This is the first decline on record, although ordinarily the data is released monthly.
Retail sales, a key metric of consumption in the world’s second-largest economy, fell by 20.5 percent, again the first decline on record. This was well below the median forecast of a group of analysts, conducted by Bloomberg, which predicted a 4.0 percent contraction.
Fixed asset investment – a gauge of expenditure on items including infrastructure, property, machinery and equipment – collapsed by 24.5 percent, much worse than analysts’ predictions of minus 2.0 percent. This was the first shrinkage on record.
As of last week, around 95 percent of large companies outside the epicenter of the virus in Hubei province had reopened, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, while “about 60 percent” of small to medium-sized firms had returned to work.
