China's slowdown worsened in October, dragged by soft consumer demand and a deepening property downturn, with the long holiday period further denting factory activity.

Fixed-asset investment, which includes real estate, contracted 1.7% for the first ten months of the year, steepening from a 0.5% decline in the January-to-September period, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed Friday. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a 0.8% drop.

The last time China recorded a contraction in fixed-asset investment was in 2020 during the pandemic, according to data going back to 1992 from Wind Information, a private database focused on the country.

On a single-month basis, fixed-asset investment fell 11.4% from a year earlier, the weakest reading since early 2020 when the first Covid l

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