China’s Developers Slash Investment for First Time Since 2020

China’s real estate industry continued a slump with investment in property development falling 2.7% in the first four months of the year, reflecting the impact of the worst Covid outbreak in two years and developers’ shaken confidence in the economic outlook.

Developers invested 3.92 trillion yuan ($577 billion) in new projects through April this year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). That represented the first year-on-year decline since the Covid outbreak emerged in Wuhan two years ago. In the first four months of 2020, such investment fell 3.3%.