China will support export firms selling products in the domestic market by easing market access, expanding sales channels and strengthening financial assistance to help them through difficulties and stabilise foreign trade.
This year, China will offer domestic market access to products originally made for export only if they meet certain technical standards. The government will also simplify the procedures for compulsory certification of the relevant products, according to guidelines released by the State Council.
Firms will be encouraged to make products for export and domestic sales on the same production line, to the same standards and of the same quality, to reduce production costs and facilitate trade transformation.
Domestic sales platforms will be established for the firms by setting up export product zones at online shopping festivals and organising promotions at major shopping streets. Other measures to be taken are facilitating direct purchases by big commercial firms in the country and attracting domestic buyers at major trade fairs.
Efforts will be made to connect export firms to the country’s new infrastructure and new urbanization initiatives, as well as major projects. This will help companies by enhancing collaborative innovations in the industrial chain, adjusting industrial structures and speeding up technological upgrades.
Room for rate cut
Under the authorisation of the People’s Bank of China, the National Interbank Funding Center (NIFC) announced the Loan Prime Rate (LPR) on Monday. The one-year LPR is 3.85% and the above-five-year LPR is 4.65%. The rates are effective until the next release.
Some analysts expect that the central bank will still have room for interest rate cuts and RRR cuts, and LPR will continue to decline in the third quarter.
Zhang Xu, chief fixed income analyst of Everbright Securities, said that in the first half of this year, the bank’s own capital cost has been reduced to varying degrees, and the credit risk premium has not been significantly expanded, which should push the quotation bank to reduce the pressure on the adding points.
However, there are some differences in the market about the decline of LPR in the second half of the year. Some people think that the downward speed of LPR will accelerate in the second half of the year, while some analysts think that the decline is limited and will not be greater than that in the first half of the year.
Excavator output
China’s national excavator output in May was 40,420 units, a substantial increase of 82.3% year-on-year, and the sales volume increased by 68% year-on-year, according to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics. In the first five months, the total output of excavators nationwide was 15,3289, up 14.7% year on year.
To some extent, the production and sales of excavators reflect the investment situation of infrastructure, and it is also one of the important perspectives to observe the economic operation.
Supercomputing
The four-day International Supercomputing Conference opened online on Monday. The conference highlighted the latest in high-performance computing (HPC) for scientific and commercial applications, bringing thousands of engineers, IT experts, system developers, and scientists from around the world together to discuss the theme of Shaping Tomorrow.
Zhou Bin, chief technology officer of Huawei Ascend Computing, introduced the HPC solution and AI product portfolio of Huawei, featuring the Huawei Atlas 900 AI cluster. He explained how AI is converging with HPC to bolster computing for HPC solutions across application domains, including supercomputing centers, manufacturing simulation, weather prediction, gene sequencing, and energy exploration.
Supercomputing plays a vital role in astronomical research, said Zhou, who discussed the challenges facing supercomputing architecture in meeting the requirements for exascale computing and exabyte storage in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The project demands new levels of scalability, affordability, stability, and algorithm adaptability, he said.
Huawei solutions, including ARM HPC and Atlas 900 AI cluster, form the supercomputing prototype for astronomical data analysis at the SKA regional center in China.
The story was written by Yang Zhijie and Liu Licong and first published at ATimesCN.com. It was translated by Nadeem Xu.