China’s Factory-Gate Inflation Softens in November

China’s industrial inflation has stayed at elevated levels since May. The pullback indicates that Beijing’s monthslong effort to alleviate an energy shortage and its crackdowns on speculation in raw materials have started to help ease cost pressure for factories, an official said.

“The rapid surge in coal, metals and other energy and raw materials prices has been initially contained,” said Dong Lijuan, a senior statistician at the statistics bureau.

Persistently high factory-gate prices in China have raised concerns about the financial health of manufacturers across the country as well as China’s role in global inflationary pressure. In addition, a worsening debt crisis among the country’s large property developers has triggered a sharp downturn in the sector in recent months and weighed on overall growth momentum.

“The abating inflationary pressure gives authorities more flexibility in loosening monetary policy,” said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategic research at China Renaissance Securities. “Further easing is much needed as growth slows down sharply.”

China’s central bank said on Monday that it would cut banks’ reserve requirement ratio, which will inject about $188 billion into the financial system and free up more cash for lending. While officials said they would avoid flooding the economy with credit, many economists interpret the move as the beginning of a new easing cycle.

Meanwhile, China’s consumer-price index rose 2.3% from a year ago in November, accelerating from October’s 1.5% increase, and rose above 2% for the first time in more than a year.

The rise in consumer inflation was mainly driven by food prices, which increased 1.6% year over year in November, after falling 2.4% in October, the statistics bureau said. Among food prices, those of fresh vegetables increased faster last month, while pork prices narrowed their year-over-year fall due to tight supply, the bureau said.

The reading was lower than the forecast of 2.6%, suggesting that demand remains subdued in part because China continues to impose strict Covid-19 restrictions that have weighed on consumer sentiment.

The emergence of the Omicron variant renewed fears of disruption in factory output and of lockdowns, though the variant’s impact on China’s economy so far appears to be limited.

During the first 11 months of the year, consumer inflation rose 0.9% year over year, well below Beijing’s annual target of around 3% for 2021.

While inflation has nudged the U.S. Federal Reserve and central banks in other major economies toward normalizing monetary policy and unwinding pandemic-era stimulus, economists say the People’s Bank of China could unleash more easing measures, with inflation expected to level off in the coming months.

Economists from Goldman Sachs expect China’s consumer inflation to stay fairly stable and producer inflation to decline further in the near term.

—Grace Zhu contributed to this article.

Write to Stella Yifan Xie at [email protected]