Sunday, November 1, 2026
China's official manufacturing purchasing managers' index fell to 49.3 in October from 50.1 in September, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday 31 October. The non-manufacturing index fell to 49.7. Construction new orders dropped to 40.0, down 5.7 points in a month.
China's economy grew 4.5 per cent from a year earlier in the third quarter, up from 4.3 per cent in the second, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. Growth over the first nine months was 4.6 per cent. Fixed-asset investment fell 7.2 per cent over the same period and retail sales of consumer goods rose 1.1 per cent.
China's commerce and science ministries published a draft on Friday 16 October that would add 40 technologies in AI, biomedicine and solar to the catalogue of technologies banned or restricted from export. The ministry says 14 would be banned and 26 restricted. Comment runs until 15 November.
At their Brussels summit on 15 October, EU leaders pushed for import quotas to protect chemicals and industrial machinery from Chinese competition, Euronews reports, and a senior EU official said the Commission will present two new trade tools by the end of the year. The bloc's annual trade deficit with China is a record €360 billion.
ASML reported record third-quarter net sales of €11.7 billion on Wednesday 14 October, toward the high end of its guidance, with a gross margin of 57.5 per cent. It guided fourth-quarter sales to €14.2 billion to €15.2 billion and 2026 sales to €44 billion to €45 billion. It does not disclose bookings, but its balance sheet moved.
China exported about 919,000 passenger cars in September, up 64 per cent from a year earlier, while domestic passenger-car sales fell 27 per cent to about 1.67 million, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported on Monday. Nine-month exports reached 7.17 million. Two EU officials say last week's hybrid deal includes a 350,000-a-year quota, though no text has been published.
ASML will announce third-quarter results on Wednesday 14 October and has guided to net sales of €11.0 billion to €12.0 billion. China was €2.9 billion, or 16 per cent, of first-half sales, against management's full-year expectation of about 20 per cent. The company stopped publishing bookings this year, so Wednesday's release will carry no order figure.
After two days of talks in Beijing, the EU's trade chief said China had agreed to "moderate" exports of hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars, with the prospect of cutting them by more than half over four years. China's own list of 16 outcomes mentions an "understanding" and no number.
China's retail sales fell 0.6 percent year-over-year in May, the first contraction since the pandemic era. Fixed asset investment declined 4.1 percent in the first five months of the year. Real estate development investment fell 16.2 percent. China Vanke, one of the few major developers to have avoided default, posted a combined $2.2 billion quarterly loss.
China's suspension of its sweeping rare earth export controls expires November 10, about a month away. August export volumes already ran 18 percent below last year despite the truce. The West spent the reprieve mostly watching.
Teikoku Databank counted 10,118 Japanese companies with a presence in mainland China in June, down 22 per cent in two years and 30 per cent from the 2012 peak. A record 4,137 left or could no longer be traced. Among those that remain, China's standing as a production base has slipped only a little since 2019. Its standing as a market has collapsed.
Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year cross-licence on Monday covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, and Qualcomm agreed to buy some of Huawei's American patents. Neither company disclosed the price. Huawei called it its first revenue-positive agreement with Qualcomm, and Nikkei reported that Qualcomm will be the net payer for the first time. The purchase needs regulatory approval.
From January to July, China reported $258.1 billion of exports to the United States. The US Census Bureau recorded $158.3 billion of imports from China and Hong Kong. The difference, almost $100 billion, is five times its usual size, and a Peterson Institute analysis says tariff evasion is the most likely reason. Vietnam's figures run the other way.
China's official manufacturing index rose to 50.1 in September, back above the line after two months of contraction. Production picked up and the services and construction gauge recovered. But the index of raw material prices jumped to 60.8, the steepest reading since the spring, while the index of prices factories charge rose to 54.0. The gap between what manufacturers pay and what they get is widening again.
UBTECH opened a plant in Liuzhou on 12 September that it says will produce more than 10,000 humanoid robots a year, one every ten minutes. Some of the assembly is done by the company's own Walker S units. The interesting number is not the robots. It is the throughput.
US officials have linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by Chinese entities to the July strike on a base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Iran obtained high-resolution pictures of the base before the attack and after it. The officials did not accuse the Chinese government. The disclosure lands ten days before Xi Jinping is due at the White House.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
Porsche's operating margin went from 14.5 percent to 0.3 in a year. Volkswagen Group deliveries in China fell 37 percent in a quarter, in a market down 20 percent overall. Some investors have concluded the group is not fixable, and the interesting question is what fixing it would require.
US officials say COSCO vessels carry concealed signals-intelligence equipment. China calls the claim baseless. Either way, the problem the accusation creates is commercial: the fleet in question calls at the ports that everyone else's cargo moves through.
China's factory gauge says contraction. Its high-tech sub-index says expansion. A single national figure is now averaging two manufacturing economies that are moving in opposite directions.