Chen Changhua: Examining the Labor Market Through Company Data (AI Translation)

【周刊提前读】陈昌华专栏：从上市公司数据看劳动力市场

In recent years, China’s central government has consistently emphasized the importance of expanding domestic demand—particularly household consumption. While some analysts attribute sluggish consumption to employment pressures, official unemployment rates have remained relatively stable. This article seeks to address the issue by analyzing data from publicly listed companies.

First, among more than 6,000 publicly listed companies that disclose their employee numbers, workforce growth has slowed noticeably since 2022. By the end of 2024, these listed companies collectively employed over 38 million people, representing about 8% of total urban employment. From 2022 to 2024, the number of employees at these companies rose by less than 2 million. On an annual basis, the year-over-year increase in their workforce stood at 5.5% in 2020 and 6.4% in 2021, but then declined steadily, reaching 0.8% in 2024, with fewer than 290,000 new employees added that year.

Before 2021, the employee growth across various industries remained relatively even. However, since then, a pronounced divergence has emerged. Between 2022 and 2024, publicly listed companies in the automotive and auto parts sector added over 870,000 employees, accounting for nearly 44% of the total increase in employment among all listed firms. The industrial equipment sector also emerged as a significant job generator, creating over 560,000 new positions—28% of the total growth. The sharp rise in auto industry jobs stemmed from the rapid expansion in electric vehicle sales, while the industrial equipment sector benefited from recent policy initiatives promoting new productive forces. Additional hiring was recorded in information technology hardware, semiconductors, and logistics. The hardware and semiconductor sectors are closely tied to policies encouraging advanced productivity, whereas logistics has gained from the boom in e-commerce during the pandemic.