Investing.com – China’s May industrial output and retail sales both missed expectations, while fixed-asset investment’s growth in the first five months were also well below forecasts, official data showed on Thursday.
Industrial output grew 6.8% year-on-year in May, missed expectations of a 6.9% growth, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement.
Industrial output, officially called industrial value added, is used to measure the activity of designated large enterprises with annual turnover of at least 20 million yuan (about 3 million U.S. dollars).
Meanwhile, Retail sales rose 8.5% from a year earlier, versus the general consensus of an increase of 9.6% and compared with a rise of 9.4% in April.
Fixed-asset investment growth also slowed to 6.1% in the first five months, well below the forecasts of 7.0%, which was the same pace as in January-April.
On the other hand, private sector fixed-asset investment rose 8.1%, compared with an increase of 8.4% in the first four months.
Economists expect China's GDP to ease to around 6.5% in 2018, from 6.9% in 2017, according to reports from Reuters earlier this year.
U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with his top trade advisers later this week to discuss whether to activate tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese goods, a senior Trump administration official said on Wednesday.
Citing people familiar with the revisions, reports on Thursday suggested the list might be slightly smaller than the initial tariff list which targeting $50 billion of Chinese goods.
“China could be a little bit upset about trade because we are very strongly clamping down on trade,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.