Today’s data selection: Many places have extended subway operations on New Year’s Eve; the food crisis will continue to spread around the world in 2024

During the New Year's Day holiday, subway operations in many places will be open all night or extended on New Year's Eve.

The New Year's Day holiday in 2024 is coming, and many places have announced that subway operations will be available all night or extended on New Year's Eve. According to STO Metro Group, from December 29 to 31, 2023, Shanghai Metro Lines 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 13 will implement delayed operations; in order to prepare for the large passenger flow arriving at night during the holiday return period, For evacuation work, on January 1, 2024, Metro Lines 1, 2, 10, and 17 will implement a scheduled expansion plan; in addition, from 20:00 on December 31, 2023 to the end of operation, Metro Lines 2 and 10 Nanjing East Road Station, Yuyuan Station of Line 14 plans to implement station closures and jump stops.

Suzhou Rail Transit has adjusted its network transportation plan. During the New Year's Day, the network will operate all night on New Year's Eve and extend its operation at other times.

According to a report by the Voice of Chongqing on December 25, Chongqing Transportation Investment Rail Group announced that based on the passenger flow characteristics on New Year’s Eve night on December 31, Chongqing Rail Group will adopt a differentiated plan to extend operating hours. The operating hours in the passenger flow direction will be extended by 1 hour to 2 hours to match passenger flow needs and facilitate passenger evacuation at night. In addition, during the New Year's Day holiday, the operation hours of the Circle Line will be extended by one hour. The entire line will be delayed before 23:30, and the delayed section after 23:30 will be from Erlang to Sikm, and from Chongqing Library to Haitangxi.

The New Year's Day holiday in 2024 is coming. On December 25, Southern Client reporters learned from Guangzhou Metro that in order to meet citizens’ holiday travel needs, the Guangzhou Metro line network will extend its operating service hours by 1.5 hours on December 31, 2023, and January 1, 2024 respectively. 1 hour.

Good harvest meets "El Niño". Will the global food crisis continue in 2024?

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations believes that in 2024, the food crisis will continue to spread around the world.

The good news is that FAO's latest forecast of world cereal stocks at the end of the 2024 season is 2.7% higher than the beginning of the period, reaching a record high. According to the latest forecast, the ratio of global cereal stocks to consumption in 2023/2024 is expected to be 30.8%, indicating that the supply situation is relatively loose, and the cereal harvest in 2024 is expected to hit a record high.

Downside factors include extreme weather events caused by El Niño and geopolitical conflicts.

In this context, how to judge global food prices in 2024? After reaching an all-time high in 2022 and declining in 2023, global food prices are expected to post another annual decline in 2024 due to lower input costs and harvests, Oxford Economics said in its latest report. good.

Chinese applicants have ranked first in the world in filing PCT international patent applications for four consecutive years.

2024 will mark the 30th anniversary of China’s accession to the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Shen Changyu, director of the State Intellectual Property Office of China, said on the 26th that the number of PCT international patents submitted by Chinese applicants has grown rapidly over the past 30 years, and has ranked first in the world for four consecutive years since 2019. one.

The number of PCT international patents submitted by Chinese applicants is growing rapidly. In 1994, when it just joined, Chinese applicants submitted less than 100 patent applications through the PCT, only 98. By 2019, it reached 59,000, ranking first in the world for the first time; it will further increase to 70,000 in 2022 It has ranked first in the world for four consecutive years, and a number of major PCT international patent applicants such as Huawei and BOE have emerged.

China actively participates in the revision and improvement of PCT international rules and carries out fruitful cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organization. In July 2012, Chinese patent documents were officially included in the PCT minimum documents; in 2021, the China State Intellectual Property Office signed a memorandum of understanding with the World Intellectual Property Organization, and from December of that year, RMB was officially used as the pricing and settlement currency for PCT-related international fees. This is the first time that the RMB has been officially used within the United Nations system.

The area of ​​newly started residential construction has reached a 15-year low. What will be the impact of reduced supply on future housing prices?

New home sales are recovering slowly, industry funding is less than expected, and land transactions have shrunk significantly... Under the influence of many unfavorable factors, real estate companies' ability and willingness to start new construction will still be insufficient in 2023, and the area of ​​new construction continues to decline.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that after the area of ​​newly started residential construction nationwide dropped by nearly 40% year-on-year in 2022, it will drop by more than 20% in the first 11 months of 2023. It is expected that it will be difficult to exceed 1 billion square meters for the whole year, which is the lowest level in the past 15 years. point. The industry predicts that this situation will hardly improve significantly next year. Chen Wenjing, market research director of China Index Research Institute, predicts that under optimistic circumstances, the area of ​​newly started construction in 2024 will also decrease slightly year-on-year.

Under this current situation, some people believe that the market will face a reduction in the supply of new homes in the future. Once sales stabilize, the market will be in short supply and housing prices may experience upward pressure.

However, many interviewees believe that the overall supply of new homes will decrease, but this will not result in a shortage of demand. In the past two years, the transaction volume of high-quality land parcels in core cities has increased significantly. The launch of these projects will ensure the supply intensity of high-energy cities; while low-energy third- and fourth-tier cities are still facing a large inventory of new homes. The property market will next enter a destocking cycle. Overall, in the short term, the upward pressure on housing prices is controllable.

In addition, after the deep adjustment in the past two years, in addition to new houses, second-hand houses are gradually growing into an effective supply in the market, and have reached a new high in the proportion of all housing transactions. Institutional data shows that in 2023, the proportion of second-hand housing transactions in Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hefei has increased significantly, reaching more than 60%. The industry predicts that the proportion of second-hand housing transactions will continue to rise in 2024, and the importance of the existing housing market will become increasingly prominent.

China's cross-border e-commerce enters the United States and hits it off with American consumers whose pockets have shrunk.

Where can I buy a $5 jumper? Under inflation, American consumers whose wallets have shrunk have found the answers they want on China's cross-border e-commerce platforms.

According to data from parcel shipping consulting firm "Transportation Matrix", Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform Temu and fast fashion company Shein ship an average of about one million packages in the United States every day. Although this figure only accounts for 1.2% of the total daily average package volume in the United States, considering that Tem only entered the U.S. market last year, this progress is considerable.

This also makes domestic e-commerce companies in the United States feel threatened. This month, the US e-commerce platform Etsy announced that it would lay off 11% of its market employees. Its CEO Silverman said earlier that Temu and Xiyin are grabbing a larger share of the e-commerce market. "It is impossible to grow quickly without grabbing share from many people."

Behind the competition among e-commerce brands, American consumers are borrowing money to consume. A report from Adobe Analytics, which tracks market consumption data, shows that as of this year's U.S. online shopping festival "Cyber ​​Monday", U.S. consumers have used $67 billion in installment loans, an increase of 16% from the same period in 2022.

Tang Ker, chief strategist of U.S. assets analyzed by investment consulting firm BCA, recently told China Business News that U.S. consumer sentiment has not yet returned to pre-epidemic levels this year, but consumer spending has remained strong. Consumption during the recent holiday sales season shows that excess savings accumulated during the epidemic still helped stimulate consumer spending and delayed the onset of economic recession. However, the tail effect of excess savings is weakening, "suggesting that excess savings will be exhausted sometime next year, which is a bad sign for the economic outlook."