China Economic Watch: SOE Earnings Up 22% in 1H; GDP to Grow 9.3% in 2011; China Has 217m Cars by June 2011

China's state-owned enterprises posted ¥17.42 trillion in revenues and ¥1.13 trillion in gross profits for 1H 2011, up 24.2% and 22.3% respectively from the same period a year ago, according to the Ministry of Finance.

China's gross domestic product will grow 9.3% this year, with fixed-asset investment slowing to 25% in 2H 2011 and retail sales rising 17% to 18% for the whole year, predicted Zhu Baoliang, deputy director of the economic forecast division of the State Information Center.

The value of China's online B2B transactions expanded 13.2% quarter on quarter to ¥2.51 billion in Q2 2011, with Alibaba.com (HKG: 1688) capturing a 61.2% share of the market, according to Analysys International.

China had 217 million vehicles by the end of June 2011, including 70 million privately-owned cars, according to the transport authority of the Ministry of Public Security.

Cargo traffic at China's major ports rose 7.3% to 750 million tons in June from a year ago, according to the Ministry of Transportation. The growth was 5.4 percentage points slower than the previous month as a result of the nation's decelerating manufacturing sector.

Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu plans to build a powerhouse for cloud services and IT terminal manufacturing that is expected to generate ¥300 billion in revenues per year by 2015. The city aims to make its cloud service account for 10% of China's total and its output of terminal devices account for 20% of the world's total five years from now.

Chongqing, a metropolis of 30 million in southwestern China, is courting Apple Inc (NASDAQ: APPL), International Business Machines Corp (NYSE: IBM), Dell Inc (NASDAQ: DELL) and South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co to build factories in the city, the local government confirmed with Yicai.com. Chongqing currently churns out 120 million laptop computers a year, and hopes to produce an additional 100 million handsets, tablet computer and printers.

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