Price of gasoline slows rise in China's consumer inflation

China's consumer inflation rose at a slower pace in July due to weaker gasoline price gains, while factory-gate inflation remained elevated despite edging down from a recent peak amid softer global commodity prices and seasonal factors, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Sunday.

The country's consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, registered a 0.5 percent year-on-year increase in July, moderating from 1.0 percent in June and marking its slowest rise since January, NBS data showed.

The cooling in year-on-year CPI growth, according to Dong Lijuan, a statistician with the bureau, stemmed largely from a sharp slowdown in gasoline price gains.

"Gasoline prices were 1.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a 17.0 percent increase in June," Dong said.

"This reduced their upward contribution to the overall CPI increase by about 0.45 percentage points and helped bring energy price growth down to 0.6 percent."

Food prices were 1.5 percent lower than a year earlier in July, a slightly smaller decline than the 1.6 percent drop in June. Pork prices were down 13.3 percent year-on-year, with the decline narrowing by 2.6 percentage points, NBS data showed.

On a month-on-month basis, the CPI edged down 0.1 percent in July, a narrower decline than the 0.3 percent drop recorded in June, the bureau said.

The core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices and is deemed a better gauge of supply-demand conditions, rose 0.9 percent year-on-year in July, easing from 1.0 percent in June, NBS data showed.

Meanwhile, China's producer price index, which gauges factory-gate prices, posted a 3.5 percent year-on-year gain in July, with the pace edging down from a nearly four-year high of 4.1 percent in June, according to the NBS.

Dong said price declines in energy-related and nonferrous metal industries, alongside seasonal shifts in construction and power generation, weighed on the index, adding that the PPI fell 0.7 percent month-on-month in July, following a 0.3 percent decline in June.