China's Ministry of Commerce, together with the National Development and Reform Commission and six other departments, released an action plan on Monday to promote smart home consumption, aiming to meet the growing demand for upgraded lifestyles.
The plan outlines measures in seven areas, including expanding high-quality smart home supply, improving industry standards, developing elderly-friendly smart homes, streamlining the service chain for recycling used household goods, and enhancing community services, and strengthening fiscal and financial support.
Specific measures include promoting elderly-friendly products such as home service robots, health monitoring devices, and smart care equipment, and enriching the supply of smart home products and home renovation services for seniors. Local authorities are encouraged to set their own subsidy categories and standards for smart home products and to support whole-home smart upgrades.
The plan also encourages manufacturers to strengthen research and development, calls for cultivating large, reputable home renovation companies and platforms offering customized, diverse renovation packages, and promotes made-to-order and appointment-based services. It calls for accelerating the formulation and implementation of national standards for smart home interoperability, guiding financial institutions to increase loan support for smart home purchases, and encouraging consumers to buy related products.
Smart homes have developed rapidly in recent years, with rising market penetration driven by faster technological upgrading and growing demand for a better quality of life.
The Ministry of Commerce said it will work with relevant departments to implement the measures and bring more smart home products into households, so as to better meet people's needs for a better life.
China unveils action plan to boost smart home consumption
China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed almost flat on Monday amid a wide sell-off of artificial intelligence-related stocks triggered by calls from top executives of major U.S. AI developers to slow the pace of AI development, according to Timothy Pope, an analyst for China Global Television Network (CGTN).
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.07 percent to 3,885.33 points on Monday, while the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.64 percent lower at 13,384.57 points.
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, lost 1.10 percent to close at 3,285.58 points Monday. The STAR Composite Index, which reflects the performance of stocks on China's sci-tech innovation board, closed 0.35 percent lower at 1,811.23 points.
Pope noted that despite the overall resilience of major indexes, AI hardware stocks were among the biggest losers on the day.
"The Chinese mainland markets proved pretty resilient today actually as global AI stocks wobbled. We saw oil prices jump and interest-rate hike bets rising as well. The Shanghai Composite Index ended the session pretty much flat, while the Shenzhen Component [Index] lost a little more than half of 1 percent. AI stocks around the world sank today after the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models. That was also backed up by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and some other industry leaders as well. But critically for Chinese companies, Amodei also called for tighter restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China. We saw AI shares on the A-share have been caught in a bit of a rotation cycle already lately, with investors switching in and out pretty aggressively from these AI hardware stocks. So that added some extra momentum to today's move out of that sector. They were falling and were one of the weaker sectors today," said Pope.
The analyst said stocks of listed big state-own banks saw an injection of capitals from investors amid AI sell-off.
"Investors took some shelter in financial stocks. The big state-owned banks were once again helping to support the Shanghai index and investors were also waiting for the latest bank-lending data, although that wasn't released before the close of the markets today. There was also a small rebalance in the STAR 50 today. A handful of new companies joined the high-tech index, but that didn't fundamentally change things for the pressured tech sector," he said.
Pope highlighted that Chinese investors will witness a slew of data release in the rest of the week, helping them to have a more comprehensive grasp of the status of the country's domestic demand.
"For the week ahead in China, it's going to be very data-heavy. Tomorrow we have a big data dump including fixed-asset investment, property data, retail sales and industrial production and that's really going to give the market some clues about the state of domestic demand after those very strong trade figures that we saw last week," he said.
Chinese stocks resilient as calls for AI slowdown trigger sell-off: analyst
