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China Manufacturing Falters

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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China’s manufacturing economy improved slightly in April, but is still in rough sharp. The HSBC Flash Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) was 49.1 in April. That is up from 48.3 in March. Any number below 50 means the sector is contracting.

It is not possible to identify the exact reason for the problem, but it falls within only a few possibilities. The first is that the growing recession in the EU, the world’s largest region by GDP, has crippled China’s exports. The other is that consumer spending within China has slowed along with its overall economy. This second reason will cause the People’s Republic a host of issues. Millions of people continue to move from rural areas into cities to be factory workers. Many of these workers expect higher wages. Manufacturing companies with slowing sales cannot pay those higher wages without sharply lowering their margins, or operating at losses.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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