IN THE BANK: Men Aijun, a farmer from Chendizi Village of Shandong Province, shows his deposit certificate at the local grain bank on June 10. To help local farmers better store their grains, the village established a grain bank in 2012. To date, over 2,000 households have used the bank (ZHANG ZHENXIANG)

Mobile Internet Buy

Alibaba Group, China's largest e-commerce company, on June 11 announced it will purchase UCWeb, a provider of mobile Internet software and services. Although the two sides did not reveal the value of the deal, the merger is expected to be the largest in China's Internet business history.

Alibaba currently holds 66 percent of UCWeb's stake with a total investment worth $686 million.

UCWeb board chairman Yu Yongfu, who will act as president of Alibaba's future UC mobile platform, said the valuation of the Alibaba-UCWeb merger far exceeds the one set by Baidu, China's most popular search engine, which purchased 91 Wireless for $1.9 billion last July.

Alibaba founder and Chairman Jack Ma said that the merger deal was agreed on because both Alibaba and UCWeb believe that the information technology era is being replaced by an age of "data technology."

The merger is expected to present a challenge to Baidu, as UCWeb's UC Browser is the world's most popular mobile browser, boasting 5 million users. Founded in 2004, the company was one of China's earliest Internet firms to specialize in mobile services.

Export Recovery

China's exports continued to recover in May amid improving demand in developed countries, which analysts believe will ease concerns over a slowdown and help stabilize growth.

Exports increased by 7 percent in May from a year earlier period, outpacing the 0.9-percent increase in April and 6.6-percent drop in March.

However, imports in May declined by 1.6 percent year on year, compared with the 0.8-percent growth in April and 11.3-percent slump in March, according to the General Administration of Customs.

"The May export performance implies a consolidation compared with the underlying momentum in April," Louis Kuijs, chief economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in China, said in a note.

Experts, however, warn of a very challenging outlook for China's foreign trade in 2014.

Inflation Up

The consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, increased 2.5 percent year on year in May, up from 1.8 percent in the previous month, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Kuang Xianming, Director of the Research Center for the Economy at the China Institute for Reform and Development (CIRD), highlighted a positive change in the CPI data.

"A notable change is that the CPI reversed the month-on-month decline recorded for the previous two months, signaling that the endogenous power of the economic growth is increasing," Kuang said.

China's producer price index (PPI) contracted 1.4 percent year on year in May, following a 2-percent decline in April, said the NBS.

Both the year-on-year and month-on-month decreases narrowed from those in the previous month, signaling rebounding market demand in industrial products, said Yu Qiumei, a senior statistician with the NBS.

The index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level, has been in deflationary territory for 27 consecutive months, the longest drop since the 1990s.