In May, imports and exports totaled 3.81 trillion yuan, up 2.7% from the same period last year. Among them, exports grew 6.3% and imports fell 2.1%.
Lu Daliang, Director of the Statistics and Analysis Department of the General Administration of Customs of China, said that since the beginning of this year, China’s economy has continued to recover and improve, and trade in goods has remained relatively resilient under external pressure. In May, China’s imports and exports continued to grow, especially after the high-level economic and trade talks between China and the United States, the growth rate accelerated significantly, and the month achieved steady growth with two fewer working days than the same period last year.
In terms of exports, electromechanical products are still the main export of my country. In the first five months, China exported 6.4 trillion yuan of electromechanical products, up 9.3% year-on-year, accounting for 60% of the total exports. Among them, industrial robots, electric vehicles, integrated circuits, and construction machinery increased by 55.4%, 19%, 18.9%, and 10.7% respectively.
In terms of imports, the import prices of major commodities such as iron ore, crude oil and coal fell, and the import value of electromechanical products increased.
As the main mode of import and export trade, in the first five months, China’s general trade import and export increased by 0.8% year-on-year, accounting for 64.2% of my country’s total foreign trade value, while processing trade and import and export in bonded logistics mode increased by 6.2% and 5.9% respectively.
In the first five months, the largest foreign trade operator, private enterprises, imported and exported 10.25 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7%, accounting for 57.1% of my country’s total foreign trade value, an increase of 2.4 percentage points over the same period last year. During the same period, foreign-invested enterprises’ imports and exports increased by 2.3%, of which May increased by 4%, and the monthly import and export value continued to grow for four consecutive months.
ASEAN, the EU and the United States are China’s top three trading partners. In the first five months, the total trade value between China and ASEAN was 3.02 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.1%, accounting for 16.8% of my country’s total foreign trade value. Imports and exports to the EU and the United States increased by 2.9% and decreased by 8.1% respectively.
It is worth mentioning that during the same period, China’s total imports and exports with countries participating in the construction of the “Belt and Road” amounted to 9.24 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.2%; imports and exports with African countries amounted to 963.21 billion yuan, an increase of 12.4%, setting a historical record for the same period.