BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Amid further containment of COVID-19, China is powering ahead by returning to work and resuming business and production. The following are the latest facts and figures:

-- China continued to see a generally stable housing market in April with house prices in 70 major cities showing milder month-on-month increases, official data showed on Monday.

New home prices in four first-tier cities -- Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou -- showed month-on-month growth of 0.2 percent in April, unchanged from a month earlier, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The country's second-tier cities saw a month-on-month increase of 0.5 percent in new home prices, up 0.2 percentage points from the previous month, while third-tier cities witnessed a month-on-month rise of 0.6 percent in new home prices compared with a 0.2-percent increase reported in March.

According to senior NBS statistician Kong Peng, the housing demand which had been curbed by the novel coronavirus epidemic increased further in April.

-- Official data showed China's trade of goods with Belt and Road countries rose by 0.9 percent year on year in the first four months when total foreign trade contracted 4.9 percent. Non-financial outbound direct investment to these countries increased by 13.4 percent in U.S. dollar terms in the same period.

The Ministry of Commerce said on Monday that measures to cushion trade firms from pandemic shocks are filtering through, as domestic sales volumes of export firms grew by 17 percent in April and 110,000 companies had received services from the China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation.

-- China's mobile phone shipments increased by 14.2 percent year-on-year to 41.73 million units in April, reversing a 10-month decline, according to a report from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

Shipments of 5G phones reached 16.38 million units in the same period, accounting for 39.3 percent of the total, according to the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The CAICT added that 48 new models were introduced to the market last month, up by 14.3 percent from a year ago, 22 of which were 5G models.