SIMIC

The producer price index (PPI), a gauge of industrial profitability, rose 6.8 per cent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said, compared with a 6.5 per cent rise tipped by a Reuters poll of analysts and a 4.4 per cent rise in March.

"Producer price inflation was the strongest since October 2017 last month, as upstream price pressures remained significant due to supply constraints. This is feeding through to a rebound in consumer price inflation, though with the latter still relatively subdued and upstream price pressures likely to be mostly transient, we still doubt that inflation is about to become a key driver of [People's Bank of China] policy," said Capital Economics economist Julian Evans-Pritchard.