Foreign trade surplus will increase by 25.4% in 2019

Despite the severe global trade in 2019, China's foreign trade still stands out. On January 14, the General Administration of Customs introduced the import and export situation in 2019. Last year, China's import and export increased by 3.4% year on year, and the trade surplus expanded by 25.4%. "China US economic and trade consultation has released positive signals, and business confidence has increased." For the reasons, Huang Guohua, deputy director of the statistics and Analysis Department of the General Administration of customs, said. The changes and development of China US trade consultation inevitably leave traces on the foreign trade data. However, under the escort of expanding opening up, tax reduction and fee reduction and optimizing business environment, China's import and export trade still ended smoothly last year. In December of last year, China's import and export value rose to 3.01 trillion yuan, a double-digit year-on-year growth rate of 12.7%. Among them, exports reached 1.67 trillion yuan, an increase of 9%; imports reached 1.34 trillion yuan, an increase of 17.7%. The scale of foreign trade import and export, export and import all reached a monthly historical peak. In addition, Huang Guohua said that since November 2019, China's manufacturing PMI has expanded for two consecutive months, which has led to an increase in imports of some raw materials and energy products. These factors also affected the December foreign trade data.

At the same time, affected by the rising price in the international market, the average import price of some bulk commodities rose. For example, the average import price of iron ore rose by 18% in December, driving the whole import up by 1.5 percentage points with the import volume increasing by 17.2%. It is worth noting that just a month ago, the Ministry of Commerce announced that China and the United States have become the first phase of the trade agreement. Zou Zhiwu, deputy director of the General Administration of customs, replied: "I believe not." Zou said that because China has a huge market and diversified trade, China US economic and trade relations are not only beneficial to China and the United States, but also to the trade and economic development of all countries in the world. The progress of China US trade consultation is of vital importance to the development of China US trade. On December 6 last year, the Tariff Commission of the State Council, based on the application of relevant enterprises, carried out the exclusion of additional tariffs on soybeans, pork and other goods purchased from the United States, and took measures not to impose countervailing tariffs on the excluded goods. In December, imports of us soybeans and pork increased significantly. Zou Zhiwu said that since November and December last year, imports from the United States have recovered, especially the import of 78.83 billion yuan in December, an increase of 9.1%, including 14.1 billion yuan of agricultural products, an increase of 2 times; 23000 cars, an increase of 1.5 times. Last December's foreign trade data also affected last year's data for the whole year. In 2019, China imported 88.51 million tons of soybeans, an increase of 0.5%; 2.108 million tons of pork, an increase of 75%; and 1.659 million tons of beef, an increase of 59.7%. The total import and export value of China's goods trade in 2019 is 31.54 trillion yuan, 3.4% higher than that in 2018. Among them, export reached 17.23 trillion yuan, an increase of 5%; import reached 14.31 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.6%; and trade surplus reached 2.92 trillion yuan, an increase of 25.4%. "In the past year, the development of China's foreign trade has shown a trend of overall stability, stability and quality improvement." Said Zou Zhiwu. Specifically, the scale of import and export rose quarter by quarter. In the first quarter of 2019, the value of import and export was 7.03 trillion yuan, 7.68 trillion yuan in the second quarter, 8.26 trillion yuan in the third quarter and 8.59 trillion yuan in the fourth quarter. Tu Xinquan, Dean of the China World Trade Organization Research Institute of the University of foreign trade and economic cooperation, believes that the introduction and implementation of a series of policies and measures to stabilize foreign trade in 2019 will enable enterprises to enjoy more convenience and benefits, boost their confidence and further stimulate their potential to participate in international trade, which plays a direct role in stabilizing foreign trade.

At the same time, with the development and change of China US trade consultation, the position of China's major trade partners has changed in 2019, and ASEAN has become China's second largest trade partner. In 2019, the largest trading partner will still be the EU, with the import and export to the EU of 4.86 trillion yuan, an increase of 8%; the import and export to ASEAN of 4.43 trillion yuan, an increase of 14.1%; the import and export to the United States of 3.73 trillion yuan, a decrease of 10.7%; the fourth largest trading partner is Japan, with the import and export to Japan of 2.17 trillion yuan, an increase of 0.4%. Yan Min, director of the Macroeconomic Research Office of the prediction Department of the National Information Center, pointed out that since 2019, the world economic growth has continued to slow down, and the sources and risk points of global turbulence have increased significantly. However, in 2019, China's import and export, import and export have all set a new record, with a better growth rate than expected. For the overall situation of China's foreign trade in 2019, Zou Zhiwu predicted that "based on preliminary analysis, China is still expected to maintain the position of the world's largest country in goods trade in 2019." Under the guidance of optimizing the business environment and other policies, private enterprises have become the largest foreign trade subject in 2019. For the first time, private enterprises have surpassed foreign-funded enterprises and become the largest foreign trade subject in China. According to the data, in 2019, the import and export of private enterprises reached 13.48 trillion yuan, an increase of 11.4%, accounting for 42.7% of China's total foreign trade, 3.1 percentage points higher than that in 2018. Among them, exports reached 8.9 trillion yuan, an increase of 13%; imports reached 4.58 trillion yuan, an increase of 8.4%.

The import and export of foreign-invested enterprises is 12.57 trillion yuan, accounting for 39.9% of China's total foreign trade value. The import and export of state-owned enterprises reached 5.32 trillion yuan, accounting for 16.9%. "In 2019, the number of private enterprises with import and export performance reached 406000, an increase of 8.7% over the previous year." Zou Zhiwu said that the current significant growth in the number of private enterprises reflects the continuous optimization of the domestic business environment, which is an important manifestation of China's endogenous momentum and development vitality in foreign trade. According to the data, in 2019, private enterprises boosted foreign trade by 4.5 percentage points. Since 2019, the reform of tariff guarantee insurance to reduce the cost of customs clearance of private enterprises has come into effect. Zou Zhiwu said: "when the commercial insurance mechanism is applied to tax payment, the private enterprises benefit the most and participate the most from such reform. This reform makes it clear that as long as the credit rating of enterprises is general or above, they can use the way of tariff guarantee insurance to guarantee their customs clearance and tax revenue. In this way, the financing cost of the enterprise can be reduced, because it is guaranteed, it can handle the customs clearance formalities in time, and the efficiency of customs clearance is greatly improved. " At the same time, customs clearance time is constantly compressed. In 2019, the overall customs clearance time for import and export will be reduced by 42.3% and 42.4% respectively compared with that in 2018, and the time will be 41.4 hours and 4 hours.