Industry-China

  • China Securities Network: Recently, downstream steel mills have a strong demand for inventory replenishment, which has driven the price of molybdenum（钼） to soar. In addition to being used in the field of stainless steel, molybdenum is also used as a new material additive in new energy fields such as new energy vehicles, photovoltaics, and wind power due to its good corrosion resistance and friction resistance（耐腐蚀性、耐摩擦性）.
  • China Finance Network: The “Annual Report on China’s Banking Wealth Management Market (2022)” shows that by the end of 2022, the bank’s wealth management market have a surviving scale of 27.65 trillion yuan, with a total of 29,400 new wealth management products issued throughout the year and 896,200 funds raised 100 million yuan, creating 880 billion yuan of income for investors. In each month of 2022, the average yield of wealth management products is 2.09%.
  • Shanghai Shipping Exchange: The market is still in a state of oversupply, the freight rates of many ocean-going routes have dropped, and the composite index has fallen. On February 17, the Shanghai Export Containerized Freight Index released by the Shanghai Shipping Exchange was 974.66 points, down 2.1% from the previous period.
  • Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: China’s gigabit fiber network(千兆光纤网络) has the ability to cover more than 500 million households, and the number of 5G base stations has reached 2.312 million. The average urban household gigabit fiber network coverage in gigabit cities exceeds 100%, and the average proportion of 5G users reaches 38.9%, both of which are higher than the national average. By the end of 2022, China’s gigabit users exceeded 90 million, and 5G users exceeded 561 million.
  • Shanghai BenDiBao(上海本地宝): The results of the Shanghai brand auction in February were released. The personal quota was 9,900 vehicles, and the effective quota of personal vehicles was entrusted to auction 1,495 vehicles. The total number of auctions was 11,395 vehicles.. The lowest transaction price was 92,300 yuan, and the average transaction price was 92,370 yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 127 yuan.
  • Central Bank Shanghai Headquarters（央行上海总部）: As of the end of January, foreign institutions held 3.28 trillion yuan of bonds in the inter-bank bond market, accounting for about 2.6% of the total custody of the inter-bank bond market. In terms of bond types, the main type of bonds held by overseas institutions is treasury bonds（国债）, with a custody volume of 2.23 trillion yuan, accounting for 67.9%; followed by policy financial bonds, with a custody volume（托管量） of 0.72 trillion yuan, accounting for 22.0%. In January, 4 new overseas institutional entities entered the inter-bank bond market.
  • Gooka sticker（咕卡） became popular among elementary school students in China. There are more than 610,000 notes on “Gooka” on Little Red Book, with 250 million views; the topic “Gooka” on Douyin has been played more than 2.45 billion times. (ps. The word “Goo 咕” in “Gooka” is transliterated from Korean, meaning “decoration”, and “Gooka” means “decorative card”. The objects to be decorated include card sets, cards, and card bricks wait.)

Company

  • British energy giant British Gas: Announced operating profit for 2022 totaling £3.3 billion, well ahead of 2021.
  • Google: In the evening of February 16, it’s reported that Google’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore had laid off about 190 employees. The laid-off employees accounted for an estimated 5.5% to 6% of Google’s local workforce, and they came from different departments, including sales, recruiting, finance, legal, Google Cloud and Google Pay.
  • AutoNavi Maps(高德地图）: Co-initiated the “Beidou Travel Application Innovation Plan北斗出行应用创新计划” with Qianxun Location to help the country’s independent high-tech technology to be widely implemented in traffic and travel scenarios; the dynamic traffic light countdown function based on Beidou computing power has served more than 1.4 billion times a day. Its daily positioning of the Beidou satellite has exceeded 300 billion times.
  • Twitter: Twitter has reportedly shut down two of its three offices in India. Twitter’s offices in the Indian capital New Delhi and the financial center of Mumbai were shut down.
  • Tesla: Mexico’s foreign minister said Tesla will soon confirm Mexico as the location for its next Gigafactory, and Musk plans to hold talks with the country’s president, López Obrador.

World

  • Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers: Although inflation data show that U.S. price pressures are expanding, it is too early to advocate that the Fed will resume the pace of raising interest rates next month.
  • Federal Reserve Bank of New York: In the fourth quarter of 2022, U.S. household debt increased by $394 billion, the largest quarterly increase in 20 years, bringing total household debt to a record $16.9 trillion. In addition, U.S. consumer credit card arrears soared to nearly $1 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, breaking the pre-pandemic record.
  • Turkey: JPMorgan Chase expects that the Turkish central bank is likely to announce a rate cut of 100 basis points to 8% next week. (Economic losses from the powerful Feb. 6 earthquake in Turkey could reach $25 billion, dragging down Turkey’s gross domestic product growth this year.)
  • Germany: Due to the lack of progress in labor negotiations, on February 17 local time, employees at Hamburg, Hannover, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Bremen and Dortmund airports in Germany went on strike.
  • Japan: At present, the price of used cars in Japan is rising. The average purchase price in 2022 was 1.566 million yen, a new high since the survey began in 2015. The reasons behind this include the lack of semiconductors, which has led to a slump in the supply of new cars, and the reduction in the number of used cars that have been recycled as used cars. Removing constraints on the supply of new cars may be the key to bringing down used car prices.