Recent geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East have triggered fluctuations in international oil prices, raising market concerns. Fu Linghui, spokesperson for China's National Bureau of Statistics, responded on March 16, stating that China possesses strong energy supply security capabilities and has a solid foundation to cope with external market volatility.
Speaking at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office, Fu noted that since the beginning of the year, China's industrial producer prices have shown a narrowing year-on-year decline. In February, the Producer Price Index (PPI) fell by 0.9% compared to the same period last year, with the decline narrowing by 0.5 percentage points from the previous month. This marks the third consecutive month of narrowing year-on-year declines. On a month-on-month basis, industrial producer prices have risen for five consecutive months.
Fu attributed the improvement in industrial producer prices to multiple factors, including expanded demand in certain domestic industries, the driving effect of new growth drivers on industrial product prices, and rising prices of some international bulk commodities.
He mentioned that with the rapid development of "AI+" in China, prices for electronic components and specialized electronic materials manufacturing increased by 4.9% year-on-year in February. Recently, prices for items such as memory chips have risen rapidly, largely due to growing domestic demand for computing power. Rising international energy and non-ferrous metal prices have also contributed to the recovery in industrial producer prices. In February, prices in the non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling processing industry rose significantly by 22.1% year-on-year.
Fu pointed out that there are still many uncertainties affecting international energy prices, and the spillover effects on domestic prices require further observation. In the next stage, efforts should focus on continuously expanding domestic demand, optimizing supply, developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions, advancing the construction of a unified national market, promoting industrial product prices to return to a reasonable range, improving economic circulation, and fostering sustained and healthy development of the industrial economy.