A new survey by the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University has some remarkable data on how China's SMEs fared during the Covid-19 lockdown. The charts are pretty easy to understand even if you don't read Chinese

This one shows the daily revenues of SMEs from 2019 through the end of March. The collapse in transactions after the lockdown, and its failure to fully recover even by end-March, are pretty obvious.

Here's another one, showing the year-on-year change in estimated monthly revenues for SMEs. Even after things loosened up some in March, revenues are still down about 60% compared to 2019: 501.1 billion vs 1,219.4 billion.

This data suggests that the reopening and recovery of small businesses from the lockdown have significantly lagged the reported "resumption rate" of large businesses. To be fair, the government's official surveys also show this pattern, but the gap is not quite so stark.

The report concludes, not unsurprisingly, that "Most small and medium-sized enterprises are still in a state of business stagnation, and the impact of the epidemic on small- and medium-sized enterprises is serious."

The survey is a bit tricky to interpret since it's not a sample survey, but rather a "big data" aggregation of transactions obtained from an associated technology company. How all that works is not totally clear to me TBH. Still interesting though.

Here's a link to the release of the survey, where you can download the full report: http://www.pbcsf.tsinghua.edu.cn/portal/article/index/id/4696.html