Sean Rocha

More evidence the China building boom is ending

A couple months ago, I wrote about my anecdotal impression from a recent trip to Fujian province in China that the great building conversion from farmland to skyscrapers — or, if you prefer, peasant agrarian economy to modern industrial one — was nearing an end.  Now the French investment bank SocGen has issued a report making a similar claim, but they have the numbers to back up my impressions.  They are astounding: last year, China built 1.8 billion square meters (almost 20 billion square feet) of new apartments and condos, which is equivalent to the entire extant building stock of Spain constructed since the times of the ancient Romans; in the process, China consumed 55% of the global cement supply last year.  But, it seems, even the world’s most populous country does not have infinite demand for housing and SocGen — using a sharp fall in sales of excavators and bulldozers as a leading indicator of the pace of construction — thinks the boom has peaked.  Everything China does is big so a bust, if indeed that is what follows the boom, will surely be gigantic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2011 at 11:45 pm. It is filed under Travels and tagged with China, East Asia, economics, Fujian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.