Mainland China’s falling property prices and a weak economy could lead to rising loan defaults, adding to a surfeit of foreclosed homes and further extending the years-long slump, according to UBS. The number of apartments seized by banks from small businesses could reach more than 2.4 million by 2027, said John Lam, head of China property research at the Swiss bank, on Tuesday. Most small businesses on the mainland pledge property as collateral for loans. The sale of these foreclosed properties...

Beijing is extending an olive branch to overseas companies as it seeks to build a more integrated global supply chain for the shipbuilding industry, in its latest push to project goodwill and support free trade. Gao Dongsheng, chief economist at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said on Tuesday that China was committed to further opening up its shipbuilding sector. Mainland shipyards, which currently have a capacity to build about 65 million deadweight tonnes of large...

With domestic profits narrowing and production capacity expanding, China’s firms are continuing to widen their overseas footprints in search of new, more lucrative markets. In this series, we examine China Inc’s next phase of “going global” and the complex, challenging international environment its companies have chosen to enter. China, known as the “world’s factory” after decades spent manufacturing and shipping much of the world’s consumer goods, is now going a step further: as a number of...

China is stepping up its chip self-sufficiency push by combining relatively mature chips with new computing architectures in an effort to approach Nvidia’s performance levels, according to a top industry expert. Logic chips made with a 14-nanometre process, which are generally seen as trailing cutting-edge AI processors, could reach a performance comparable with Nvidia’s 4nm products if they were integrated with high-performance memory and an innovative computing architecture, said Wei Shaojun,...

China’s finance minister has called for a more proactive fiscal policy to boost domestic demand, strengthen industrial security and advance technological self-reliance while mitigating debt risks, as Beijing prepares for one of its most important economic planning meetings of the year. Finance Minister Lan Foan outlined the country’s top fiscal priorities on Tuesday in an editorial published in the People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s flagship newspaper. He stressed the need to support...

China logged a record 180 billion express deliveries in the first 11 months of the year, according to state media reports, as the country’s online shopping platforms continue to rake in orders despite an economic slowdown. Xinhua said the bumper parcel deliveries – which reached as high as 777 million per day from January to November, according to the State Post Bureau – reflected the “vigorous vitality of China’s economy”, though analysts cautioned that vendors were often relying on generous...