China’s soft PMI data suggests domestic challenges carried over into 2026 in World Economy News 03/02/2026 Official manufacturing PMI falls back into contraction China’s January PMI fell back into contraction at 49.3, down from December’s 50.1. This came in well below forecasts for another month of expansion. Manufacturing PMI has been in contractionary territory for nine of the past 10 months. This suggests that December’s data may have been a blip rather than the start of a recovery trend. With that said, soft PMI data has not particularly been reflected in the hard activity data. Industrial production generally had a strong year in 2025. We’ll have to wait until the hard data for January-February is published in mid-March to see if this divergence continues. Looking at the subcategories, we saw a broad-based slowdown across most categories. Production remained in expansion territory in January, but slipped from 51.7 to 50.6. New orders slowed from 50.8 to 49.2, returning to the same level as November. New export orders pulled back to 47.8 from 49.0. Other indicators such as order backlogs and employment also edged down on the month. There were a few silver linings in the data. One, ex-factory prices rose to 50.6. This was a 28-month high, and the first time in 20 months that we saw this subindex over 50. Raw material input prices rose to 56.1, a 20-month-high. Both of these sub-indices trending higher is a positive sign for addressing deflation concerns. By enterprise size, China’s large companies continued to outperform the medium and small ones, with large enterprise PMI still in expansion while medium and small enterprises were in contraction. In contrast, the RatingDog China manufacturing PMI painted a more optimistic picture, rising from 50.1 to 50.3. In this data, we see similar trends of higher output prices, but in contrast with the official PMI data, there was also a pickup of the key subindices of production, new orders, and employment. This PMI tends to have a sample size focused more on private and export-focused enterprises, and has generally done better than the official PMI over the past half year or so. This is consistent with the story we saw for 2025, when external demand was a key growth driver, while domestic demand indicators had all been quite soft. Non-manufacturing PMI also slips back into contraction China’s January non-manufacturing PMI fell to 49.4, down from 50.2 in December, hitting a 37-month low. Non-manufacturing PMI previously snapped a streak of 34 months of neutral or expansionary levels in November 2025, before bouncing back in December. The decline back below 50 in January suggests that the trajectory remains negative. Most of the key sub-indices softened on the month. New orders (46.1) and export orders (46.9) both fell from December’s levels. Only two sub-indices were in expansionary territory, business expectations (56.0) and suppliers’ delivery time (51.1). One of China’s main goals is to improve services consumption and quality to boost domestic demand as a growth engine. Potential efforts to boost services consumption could eventually be reflected in the non-manufacturing PMI data later in the year. Source: ING 2026-02-03 hellenicshippingnews... window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-US'}; (function(w, d, s) { function go(){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], load = function(url, id) { if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.src = url; js.id = id; fjs.parentNode.insertB