China’s export growth accelerates

Some more news confirming China is slowly moving towards recovery today, which supports our overall view that now is the time to byy China stocks listed on the Hang Seng.

China’s export growth accelerated in October in fresh evidence of a broader rebound for the world’s second-largest economy just as the Communist Party grapples with how to boost recovery from a rare slowdown.

Exports rose 11.6 per cent in October from a year earlier to US$175.6 billion, the national customs bureau said on Saturday, strengthening for a second straight month and beating economists’ expectations.

Imports, meanwhile, increased 2.4 per cent to US$143.6 billion, matching September’s gain but falling short of analyst forecasts.

The country’s trade surplus, a source of friction with countries including the United States, widened to US$32 billion for the month, up from US$27.7 billion in September.

The size of the surplus was a surprise, surpassing the median forecast of US$27 billion in a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires.

Those economists had also forecast a 10 per cent increase in exports and a four per cent gain in imports.

China’s economic growth has slowed for seven straight quarters and hit a more than three-year low of 7.4 per cent in the three months through September, but recent data has fuelled optimism the worst may be over.

Industrial production for October rose 9.6 per cent on year from 9.2 per cent in September, the government said on Friday. Retail sales, the main measure of consumer spending, also accelerated to a 14.5 per cent gain during the month.

Fixed-asset investment, a key gauge of infrastructure spending, also showed improvement in October, while inflation remained well under control, dipping to a nearly three-year low of 1.7 per cent in October.

Economists have seized on the recent improvement in Chinese data as a sign that economic growth will likely accelerate in the current fourth quarter through the end of December.

“Today’s trade data, together with improving domestic demand indicators released yesterday, continue to support our view that China’s growth momentum has picked up,” ANZ bank economists Liu Li-Gang and Zhou Hao wrote in a commentary.