According to the country's statistics chief, despite an apparent recent drop in terms of automobile and mobile phone sales, China's economy still managed to achieve a good start this 2019.
Just last February, mobile phone sales dropped by up to 19.9 percent, while at the same time the overall amount of vehicle sales fell for the eight straight months in the biggest car market in the world.
Despite all of this, however, Ning Jizhe, who acts as the head for the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said last Tuesday, "According to data available as of now, the Chinese economy has achieved a good start." The head then went on to cite several industrial companies with stable production, as well as steady employment for the first two months of 2019.
Furthermore, the NBS is also expected to release data about China's industrial production, retail sales, and fixed-asset investment for the month of both January and February come this Thursday. Together, the accumulated data will present what the economy really looked like at the start of this year. NBS however, is highly optimistic about the numbers, saying that the country entered the year with good spirits, and the drops were just a speed bump on the road, and not actual problems.
Recent drops
This February, mobile phone sales plummeted down as high as 19.9 percent from a year earlier, going down to just 14.5 million units and increasing from January's 12.8 percent. This data is released by the China Academy for Information and Communications Technology, which is an agency that's under the wing of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Total vehicle sales, on the other hand, fell as much as 13.8 percent the previous month, going down to 1.48 million units. This information is released by the government-backed China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
Furthermore, for the first two months of the year, vehicle sales totaled 3.85 million units, which represents a drop of 15 percent from the same time last year.
However, Ning also said that China's electricity output rose by 6.7 percent last February, as well as cinema box office revenue, which reached a record high during the Lunar New Year holiday. He also added that in the first 10 days of March, the average daily electricity output rose by about 11 percent, indicating continuous growth.
