Image Source : China Visual

BEIJING, November 15 (TMTPOST) — China's fixed asset investment grew by 5.8% year-on-year from January to October, with investment in high-tech industries continuing to log rapid growth, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday.

Despite the acceleration of infrastructure investment supported by various policy tools, investment growth in the first 10 months slowed slightly due to the slowdown in manufacturing and real estate investment.

Investment performance was slightly lower than market expectations. According to a recent survey of 13 institutions by Caixin Media, the average forecast of economists for the cumulative year-on-year growth rate of fixed asset investment from January to October was 5.9%, with a forecast range of 5.6% to 6.1%.

Among the three major categories of investment, the cumulative year-on-year growth rate of infrastructure investment from January to October was 8.7%, up by 0.1 percentage points. Since mid-2022, infrastructure investment has been the focal point of policy measures to stabilize the economy. In addition to new special debt funds, more than 600 billion yuan ($85.23 billion) of policy-oriented development financial instruments have been issued and the balance of more than 500 billion yuan ($71.01 billion)  of special debt has been used to provide sustained support for infrastructure investment growth.

Due to the slowdown in exports, industrial profits contraction, and other factors, January-October manufacturing investment growth rate fell 0.4 percentage points year-on-year to 9.7%.

For the January-October period, real estate investment decreased by 0.8 percentage points year-on-year to 8.8%, falling to the lowest since 2020. Despite the low base for the same period in 2021, 200 billion yuan ($28.4 billion) of special loans gave a certain impetus to the delivery of buildings. But real estate sales remain sluggish, and market confidence is still not significantly improved.  In October, real estate investment fell by 3.9 percentage points year-on-year to 16.0%.