A remarkable transformation has taken place in the global automotive export market in the past few years, with some of the biggest names in the industry left in the dust. China, a net importer of motor vehicles until 2018, whose automotive industry primarily existed to serve domestic markets, has accelerated its way into the forefront group of global exporters.  Refresh this chart in your browser | Edit the chart in Datastream China’s domestic production was already significant before that date — data from Wards Intelligence suggest that China has been the largest producer of vehicles since the Global Financial Crisis — but

One of the defining features of the past few years has been the continued rise of the US tech giants. In 2025, however, momentum in innovation appears to have started to shift towards the other side of the Pacific. Chinese technology firms, long viewed as playing catch-up, are now emerging as contenders in the global AI race. Leading this surge is DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that, on 24 January 2025, unveiled its R1 large-language model — reportedly developed at a fraction of the cost of similar models from US counterparts. Despite its modest budget, R1 is said to perform competitively,

An ageing population, declining bang-for-investment-buck and a US determined to stymie China’s rise has Asia’s greatest powerhouse facing what looks to be a long decline. Since the global financial crisis, real estate construction and investment has been the Chinese government’s favoured economic fallback. This has allowed them to paper over cracks in local government finances, keeping employment high, albeit unproductive, and therefore limiting the risk of social unrest while supporting economic activity. Refresh this chart in your browser | Edit the chart in Datastream However, with investment having far outpaced demand, this has led to a buildup of massive imbalances in the

It has been ten years since the People’s Republic of China launched its ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative — a decade-long plan to make China dominant in high-tech manufacturing across a range of sectors — including IT, new energy and robotics. To the best of our knowledge, Fathom’s recently updated RiCArdo dataset is the only existing dataset designed specifically to assess China’s progress in the sectors targeted by the plan. It shows that MIC-related sectors combined accounted for 18.8% of China’s total goods exports in 2023, up from 15.6% when the plan was first announced. Refresh this chart in your

During the U.S. presidential election campaign, Donald Trump promised to fix the economy by eliminating inflation, cutting taxes and increasing tariffs. This raises a challenge for asset allocators as to how these policies will hit expected asset returns in the short and long run. The incoming president will inherit a robust economy with a labor market in rude health and unemployment at only 4.1%. Real wages are rising and job openings, although down from post-pandemic levels, are still at the same highs reached during 2018-19, as shown in exhibit 1. Exhibit 1: U.S. Labor Market Indicators Furthermore, the ex ante

Donald Trump’s return to the White House, from next year, presents China with fresh challenges — especially in the wake of a persistent real estate crisis, weak internal demand and growing imbalances related to production overcapacity, as well as an ageing population and high levels of indebtedness, which will continue to weigh on China’s economic dynamism on a short- to medium-term horizon. Although the latest indicators showed some signs of stabilisation in activity (e.g., industrial production, retail sales), the downwards evolution of prices in China continues to reinforce the weakness of household consumption and the deflationary risks that limit the

As part of his re-election campaign, Donald Trump proposed a 60 per cent tariff on all Chinese goods. Whether he implements it or not, the US President-elect’s threat may be intended to bring Beijing to the negotiating table. But even if he succeeds in striking an agreement, it seems less clear that such a deal will lead to an increase in US exports to China. A study from the Peterson institute on the ‘Phase One’ deal between the US and China, agreed at the end of Trump’s last term, shows that China has bought none of the extra $200 billion

Consumer prices in China increased by just 0.4% in the year to September, the National Bureau of Statistics said on 13 October. The outturn was 0.2 percentage points below the expectations of the consensus of economists polled by Reuters. Chinese inflation outturns coming in below consensus should not be entirely unexpected — as the chart below shows, this has tended to be the case for several years. An additional worry for policymakers in the PRC is that core inflation dropped to just 0.1% in the year to September, reflecting continued weak demand in the Chinese economy. Moreover, we do not

China initiated a large-scale leveraging process during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), with authorities implementing an unprecedented stimulus package that was based on increased lending to several institutions, which included SOEs, property developers and the newly created local government financing vehicles (LGFV). This large stimulus was successful in preventing a recession in China, but it came at the cost of growing financial risks and debt, considering the amount of credit deployed in such a short period, fuelling several asset bubbles in property, stocks and commodity markets. After some initial deleveraging attempts by Beijing (which included policy rate hikes and tighter

Fertility rates in advanced economies have been falling in recent decades. The average fertility rate across G7 countries in 1960 was 2.80, which had fallen to 1.47 by 2022. If left unchecked this phenomenon may cause populations in these countries to stagnate and even shrink in the coming years. One can attribute the falling fertility rates in these countries to a slew of positive outcomes: falling child mortality rates, increased availability of contraception, higher incomes and, importantly, female emancipation. However, the consequences of declining fertility rates may not be as positive, with many of these economies also reporting falling Gross

The price of North Sea Brent Crude oil has fallen this month, down 8% from a peak on 5 July. The main driver of the price decrease was weak global demand, in particular from China, the world’s largest importer, representing 15% of the IEA’s forecast of global crude oil production in 2023. China’s imports of crude oil (by volume) were down 9% in May and 11% in June compared to the year before. Additionally, Chinese refiners are cutting back production amidst weak economic growth and a housing crisis that has decreased demand for oil used in construction. The country’s total

Based on official data, China appears to have started off 2024 on the right foot, with the pick-up in several indicators (including industrial production, retail sales and exports) implying that the economy is improving. Indeed, China’s National Bureau of Statistics released a robust first quarter GDP growth rate of 1.6% quarter-on-quarter, up from the previous 1.2%. Year-on-year, the growth figure was a notable 5.3%. This release surprised on the upside, prompting widespread upward revisions to the forecast growth rate for the year, including those surveyed by Reuters Polls. Interestingly, however, Fathom’s China Momentum Indicator (CMI) paints a rather different picture: