At the central economic work conference at the end of 2021, it was mentioned that “infrastructure investment should be carried out moderately in advance”. Under this background, all localities have promoted the centralized commencement of (Major) projects recently, significantly earlier than last year. We combed the situation of centralized construction at the beginning of the year to observe the rhythm and intensity of the steady growth policy.
The first batch of centralized construction shows signs of “stronger province”, or is related to the abundance of project reserves: (1) the project investment scale in economically strong provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong is stronger than that in 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, the annual investment of projects planned to start in Jiangsu Province was 572 billion yuan (not limited to major projects), an increase of 134.3 billion yuan compared with 2021; The total investment and annual planned investment of Zhejiang Province reached 638.6 billion yuan and 92.1 billion yuan respectively, an increase of 56.3 billion yuan and 19.4 billion yuan compared with 2021. In addition, although not the first batch of centralized commencement data, the annual planned investment in Guangdong Province increased by 100 billion yuan to 900 billion yuan compared with 2021. (2) For other provinces with data released, the investment growth is relatively low. The total investment of the first batch of major projects in Henan Province in 2022 was 595.6 billion yuan, accounting for 37% of the projects in February 2021; The total investment of major projects in Hebei Province is 1120 billion yuan, slightly lower than 1188.65 billion yuan in 2021. It is estimated that more than 250 billion yuan will be invested during the year. If calculated according to the lower limit, it will be about 89% in 2021.
The commencement time of major projects around the country is generally ahead of schedule. In previous years, most provinces started concentrated construction in the first quarter from late February to March (Anhui started concentrated construction earlier, the first batch was started on January 17 and the second batch on February 18 in 2021, so it was only about half a month earlier than 2021). Other provinces were more than a month earlier than 2021, such as Jiangsu and Henan, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Guangdong Hebei two to two and a half months ahead of schedule.
From the perspective of capital investment direction, the proportion of infrastructure and industry (Manufacturing) in major projects in some regions has increased, or related to “moderately ahead of infrastructure investment”. At the same time, the “new infrastructure” involves non infrastructure industries such as industrial Internet, artificial intelligence and big data center, and the proportion of industrial investment has also increased. Compared with the annual plan of last year, the proportion of manufacturing investment in the first batch of centralized construction projects in Anhui increased by 28 percentage points to 59%; Compared with the centralized construction in the first quarter of last year, the proportion of investment in infrastructure, innovation and industrial projects in Sichuan increased by 4 percentage points, reaching 23% and 55% respectively; Industrial projects (not limited to major projects) in Jiangsu Province increased by 7 percentage points to 84%.
In terms of the number of projects, the proportion of infrastructure projects has increased significantly, and some provinces may reverse the decline in the proportion of major infrastructure projects since 2019. According to public information, among the first batch of centralized construction projects in Zhejiang Province in 2022, the number of industrial projects accounted for 53%, while the total number of industrial and high-tech projects in 2021 was 56.6%. However, the proportion of infrastructure projects or gradually decreased in previous years. From 2019 to 2021, the proportion of infrastructure projects in major projects in Zhejiang province gradually decreased from 16.4% to 9.2%, However, the first batch of centralized capital construction projects in 2022 is significantly more than those planned in previous years (see the image schedule of key construction projects in Zhejiang Province for details) – the number of major capital construction projects in Zhejiang province accounted for 9.2% of the total projects in 2021, lower than 19% of the first batch of centralized capital construction projects this year. In addition, the proportion of the first batch of infrastructure projects (not limited to major projects) in Xiamen has also increased significantly, about 47.7% in 2022, higher than 36% of major projects in 2021.
According to the existing data, “early” is the biggest feature, but the reserves of the first batch of projects are not necessarily rich, and the scale growth is not necessarily significantly greater than that in previous years. Provinces with relatively strong finance have more advantages. In addition, this centralized construction is more inclined to industry and infrastructure.
Risk statement
Different caliber leads to weak data comparability. For example, there are differences in the expressions of “current round of centralized construction” and “annual planned investment”, “annual planned investment” and “total investment”, “project” and “major project”.
