Employees work at a factory producing trucks in Zhangjiakou in China’s northern Hebei province on June 9, 2021.
STR | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese factories are facing the largest gap on record between the speed at which producer prices and consumer prices are climbing.
Selling prices to private consumers are holding fairly steady, while production costs are soaring. That cuts into how much money manufacturers can make.
China’s producer price index rose 9% in May from a year ago — the fastest since 2008 — as commodity prices surged, while the consumer price index climbed 1.3%, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday.
The difference between the two reached 7.7 percentage points, the highest on record, surpassing the previous peak of 7 percentage points in 2017.
The widening gap affects heavy commodity users the most, Larry Hu, chief…
