This photo shows Nansha Port in Guangzhou, South China's province of Guangdong. China's foreign trade is expected to see stable growth this year, despite unprecedented challenges, including high raw material costs and fierce competition from Southeast Asian countries, analysts and trade experts said on Wednesday.
The China Council for the Promotion of International Trade in Beijing said that the profitability of exporters in most sectors has improved during the second quarter. The survey shows that the main challenges facing foreign trade enterprises, such as high costs of logistics, have been averted.
It is worth noting that trade data got better from quarter to quarter, but also from month to month during the second quarter. Liu Ying, a researcher at the Renmin University of China, said June could have seen a strong foreign trade rebound and a more energetic economic recovery.
More than 25 percent of enterprises recorded positive quarter-on-quarter revenue growth, while nearly 20 percent said they have secured profit growth from a quarter ago.
More than 26 percent of respondents are confident in the year-on-year revenue growth, and about 28 percent say they expect their revenues to be the same as last year's level.
Liu predicted that China's foreign trade will exceed 40 trillion yuan $5.97 trillion this year, with policy measures showing off the advantages of the nation's resilient supply and industrial chains.
The RCPAR agreement took effect on January 1, and interest rate increases by the United States, which Liu believes will facilitate China's exports.
The survey found that new trade formats such as cross-border e-commerce provided strong support to export growth, and the nation's policies to ease the burdens of foreign trade enterprises, such as smooth logistics and speeding up tax and fee reductions, have boosted the sector as well.
More than 40 percent of the enterprises in the survey said they have become familiar with the RCEP rules, up 17.69 percentage points from the first quarter. 54 percent plan to use the rules for their benefit.
More than 10,000 enterprises have been issued 43,600 RCEP certificates of origin from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
Even though there were some transfers of production capacities and export orders from China to other countries during the second quarter, the nation proved its strong resilience in foreign trade and plenty of flexibility in the industrial chain, according to a researcher at the International Monetary Institute at Renmin University of China.
The company is currently recruiting more workers as orders in the first half of 2022 have already reached the full-year level of 2021, according to Zhao Shengmei, General Manager of Newcom Group, a bag and travel luggage manufacturer in Pinghu, Zhejiang province.
A report released by the People's Bank of China shows that the export order index came in at 41 percent in the second quarter, down 9.6 percentage points from the same period in 2021, a decrease from the same period in 2021, according to a report released on Wednesday by the People's Bank of China. The figure went up by just 0.1 percentage points from the first quarter of the year.
Liu Xiangdong, a researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said Vietnam's fast export growth will not threaten China's position in the global supply chain in the short term due to their tightly integrated industrial chains.
He said that China must increase the resilience of the industrial chain and work with neighboring countries to mitigate risks and increase export volume in high-end manufacturing.