China’s Economic Recovery Slowed In April

BEIJING—China’s economic activity grew at a slower pace in April as retail sales missed expectations, complicating the picture of a steady and balanced recovery in the world’s second-largest economy.

Official data released Monday showed industrial output and fixed-asset investment beating market expectations and continuing to lead the recovery, but domestic consumer spending, which has lagged behind for months, remaining soft.

China’s industrial production in April was up 9.8% from a year earlier, slower than March’s 14.1% pace, the National Bureau of Statistics said Monday. Fixed-asset investment decelerated as well, to 19.9% in the January-April period from 25.6% in the first quarter.

Retail sales, a key gauge of China’s domestic consumption, underwhelmed: April’s figure was up 17.7% from the pandemic-hit level a year earlier, well short of March’s 34.2% pace.

Economists had largely expected the double-digit year-over-year percentage growth that major indicators delivered, given the low-base of comparison from a year earlier, when China’s economy had just begun to bounce back from the coronavirus shock. In the coming months, however, that “low-base effect” will fade, given the economy’s recovery during the spring and summer last year.

Monday’s figures on industrial output and fixed-asset investment actually exceeded the forecasts of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal, who had pegged 9.1% and 19.2%, respectively. Retail sales, however, missed their predicted 24.9%.

To strip out last year’s pandemic distortions, government statisticians and economists have benchmarked this year’s numbers against 2019’s. By that measure, official data showed industrial production up 14.1% in April, largely in line with March’s growth rate, while the pace of retail-sales slowed to 8.8% from March’s 12.9%.

The retail-sales miss was a particular disappointment for economists and policy makers, who have been watching for several months for signs of a tilt toward consumption-driven growth in the Chinese economy, after more than a year of expansion led by manufacturing and exports.

For the Chinese economy as a whole, says Ding Shuang, an economist at Standard Chartered, “The problem is not the growth rate, but its unbalanced recovery. Some sectors, such as industrial activity, appeared to be too hot, while others, like service and consumption, haven’t yet recovered to pre-virus levels.”

China’s strong rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic last year was largely driven by its swift factory resumption and government-led investment, while household spending has repeatedly fallen short of expectations.

Pointing to the softness in domestic spending, the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo—its top decision-making body—said last month that the economic recovery remains uneven and its foundation less than solid.

China’s gross domestic product reported a record year-over-year gain of 18.3% in the first quarter. That makes meeting Beijing’s official target of “above 6%” growth for 2021 a relatively light lift.

Economists argue that the modest growth target leaves Beijing’s policy makers with more wiggle room to address longer-term structural problems in the economy—such as high leverage, potential asset-price bubbles and, in particular, the weakness of domestic consumption.

Chinese policy makers face a dilemma, Louis Kuijs, an economist with Oxford Economics, told clients in a note Monday: While Beijing wants to dial down leverage generally, the persistently weak consumption numbers may increase “pressure to pursue a more pro-growth macro policy that could increase financial risks and leverage.”

April’s lacklustre consumption data came even as China’s labour market showed signs of improvement. The urban surveyed unemployment rate, China’s headline jobless figure, dropped to 5.1% in April, the lowest level in more than a year.

In a briefing Monday, Fu Linghui, a spokesman for China’s statistics bureau, acknowledged the imbalance in the economic recovery, but said the improving labour market and increasing household income would lift consumption.

Iris Pang, an economist with ING Group, said April’s consumption weakness might prove short-lived, with figures for the five-day Labor Day holiday at the start of May indicating robust spending.

Over the holiday, Chinese people made a total of 230 million trips, marking the first time that traveller numbers topped pre-virus levels. The nation’s box office also broke records for revenue and number of moviegoers.

Meanwhile, though fewer cities in China reported rising home prices in April, average new home prices nationwide in April were up 4.45% from a year earlier, official statisticians said Monday, following a 4.36% year-over-year rise in March—underscoring the challenge that policy makers face in reining in home prices.

Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.

Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.

Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.

Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.

Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.

Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.

“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.

AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.

Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.

Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.

The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.

“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.

That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.

By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.

Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.

Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.

Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.

These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.

Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.

Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.

Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.

Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.

To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.

Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.

Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.

Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.

Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.

TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.

Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.

One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.

Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.

Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.

However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.

China’s Economic Recovery Slowed In April

Growth in retail sales slowed sharply from March pace.

Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.