Consumer prices up in China but producer index slides

Beijing

THE pace of Chinese inflation unexpectedly picked up in February, but producer prices continued to slide, underscoring the intense pressure on profit margins at Chinese companies and adding urgency to policymakers' efforts to find new ways to support growth.

The producer price index (PPI) declined 4.8 per cent in February, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday - the most negative reading posted since October 2009 - extending a long-running factory deflation cycle that began in 2012 to nearly three years.