China’s eco­nomic rebound has been weaker than expec­ted.

China’s eco­nomic rebound has been weaker than expec­ted as con­sumers emerge «stunned» from pan­demic-led dis­rup­tions and a real estate melt­down last year, warned AP Møller-Maersk. Vin­cent Clerc, the new chief exec­ut­ive of the con­tainer ship­ping group, said, however, that trad­ing volumes linked with the eco­nomy remained resi­li­ent, with little sign of neg­at­ive impact from US-led efforts to «decouple» from China. «When we star­ted the year, there was this hope that as China reopens after Covid, we would see a strong rebound,» Clerc said in Beijing. China has set a growth tar­get of 5 per cent this year, its low­est in dec­ades, after the world’s second-largest eco­nomy under­shot expect­a­tions in 2022 as a res­ult of Pres­id­ent Xi Jin­ping’s strict zero-Covid strategy.

The IMF is pre­dict­ing growth of 5.2 per cent in China this year. «This is not quite the Roar­ing Twen­ties-type mood that one could have expec­ted after this long inter­rup­tion,» said Clerc, who was among global chief exec­ut­ives in Beijing at the week­end for the coun­try’s annual China Devel­op­ment Forum investor con­fer­ence. Maersk has gained greater expos­ure to China’s domestic con­sumer mar­ket through its $3.6bn acquis­i­tion in 2021 of Hong Kong-based LF Logist­ics, which has extens­ive logist­ics oper­a­tions on the main­land. However, he added that there was no sign of decoup­ling bey­ond the high-tech sec­tor, which accoun­ted for a frac­tion of the volume of China’s exports and imports.

«China has never traded as much with the rest of the world as it did last year, and at the same time, we are talk­ing about decoup­ling, so it’s an inter­est­ing con­trast,» he said. 

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