China Momentum Indicator Plunges to “Hard Landing” Level
“But nothing is normal in China anymore.”
Hard-landing gurus have been predicting an imminent end of the China bubble for years. A “hard landing” would be the optimistic scenario. The other scenario would be a crash-and-burn. But to their greatest frustration, there was no hard landing, or a soft landing, or any landing for that matter. China just kept on flying.
Fueled by an enormous credit bubble and monetary propellants, it kept adding to entire ghost cities, industrial overcapacity, and the most breath-taking infrastructure build-out the world has ever seen. Global demand for its products faded as labor got more expensive, but the 1.35 billion increasingly moneyed Chinese consumers discovered splurging on smartphones, cars, luxury goods, and a million other things. The China bubble stayed aloft, despite all the cracks appearing here and there.
But now it’s running out of air.
The car business in China has been the most phenomenal growth party in the world: in two decades, it went from nearly nothing to 20 million passenger vehicle sales per year. Every global manufacturer elbowed into it with multi-billion dollar investments. It’s a big part of the Chinese economy, impacting retail sales, manufacturing, and investment in fixed assets as plants, distribution centers, and dealerships are built. It adds to transportation as these cars are shipped from the plant to dealers across the country. It adds to services such as finance and insurance.
But the party has been running out of booze. In April it just about stalled at a dreadfully tiny year-over-year growth rate of 3.7% when the industry is counting on a 9% increase for the year and is building out capacity to accommodate much more. Hence what automakers dread: price cuts.
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