Economic Watch: Upbeat signs in Chinese market
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Despite all the doom-and-gloom stories from "bears" in the Chinese market, a tour around Beijing's CBD, with the China World Trade Center at its heart, presents a very different perspective.

From the number of Starbucks stores to office rentals, a set of little-known "indexes" point to foreign business confidence in China's economy.

While China may have taken a few numerical steps backward recently, overcapacity is slashed and outdated practices are laid to rest in preparation for some giant strides forward.

STARBUCKS "INDEX"

Walking into any Starbucks in Beijing, people will hardly be overwhelmed by signs of economic slowdown. The queues are long and the seats are all occupied: those middle class customers don't bat an eye at paying 30-yuan (about 4.6 U.S. dollars) for a simple coffee latte.

China's enthusiasm for consumption, like Starbucks' appetite for expansion, knows little bounds.

Since its first store opened doors in China in 1999, Starbucks has expanded to more than 1,900 shops in 99 cities, making China the chain's biggest market outside the United States.

When Starbucks actually closed that first store -- coincidentally in CBD -- in 2013, and another (also in CBD) in 2015, rumors abounded that high rents had done for the company, fueling the naysayers eternally bearish view of China's economic prospects.

"These were not shut-downs, but relocations," said Zheng Tie, assistant director of the China World Mall, a shopping center close to where the stores once stood.

The first shop was far too small. Back in 1999, Starbucks had no idea that the market in China would be so huge, Zheng told Xinhua. The store was relocated to bigger premises in a new commercial center nearby, and business was even better.

The store that closed last year is moving to a new location along the street, where new products and services will be tried out, Zheng said.

By 2019, the company expects to have 3,400 stores in China, which means a new Starbucks springing up every day.

"We are very bullish on the Chinese market and will continue to develop our businesses here as we did in past years," Hao Yan, communications manager with Starbucks Beijing, told Xinhua.

OFFICE RENTALS "INDEX"

It's not just about waking up and smelling the coffee, another "index" to look into is the trend in office rental, which, to some extent, could be seen as a yardstick of China's economy.

The monthly rent in the China World Trade Center fell sharply to 200 yuan per square meter during the financial crisis in 2009, but bounced back to 400 yuan in the following year, according to CBRE, a real estate service firm that releases quarterly reports on office rental.

While the health of a country's real estate industry is closely correlated with the economic cycle, the rent of office space is also a highly cyclical economic barometer.

Since 2010, office rents have risen steadily across China. Net "absorption," a measure of how fast available supply is sold, increased in 2015 by 70 percent in first-tier cities -- Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen -- CBRE said.

The rising rental index was in part driven by foreign firms' continuing to invest in China, analysts said. Energy giant Shell, for example, just took up residence in a Beijing skyscraper.

Li Lusha, spokesperson for Shell China, said that new office will bring together employees from separate locations.

"As our business in China expands, our current office space can no longer accommodate our increasing number of employees," Li said.

CEO CONFIDENCE "INDEX"

Starbucks and Shell are definitely not alone in betting on China.

For another "index," global CEOs don't think the Chinese economy is as bad as some prophets of doom would have some believe.

"The real economy in China is a lot better than people are talking about right now," Joe Kaeser, CEO of German industrial giant Siemens AG, told media in a recent interview, while pointing to "some weakness in terms of real estate and the finance sector."

Siemens had recovered "a lot" of market share in China thanks to new business opportunities in fields such as energy management, he said. "So we are actually pretty happy with what we are seeing in China relative to what their structural challenges are," Kaeser said.

In an annual global CEO survey published by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in January, over a third of global CEOs still consider China the most important place for overall growth prospects in the next 12 months.

In a separate survey by PwC, 93 percent of CEOs said that they are confident that their China revenues will increase in the next three to five years.

China's economic scale will double to 20 trillion U.S. dollars by 2030, making the country the biggest economy in the world, PwC estimated.

"That means China still has 10 trillion dollars of economic scale that requires different types of companies to create," said Wu Weijun, a partner of PwC in Beijing, "If any multinational doesn't include China into its development plan, that's not a multinational at all."

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Author： 　　　Source：xinhua　　　 Editor：Yang Fan