China : Trade surplus drops in March

Although Vice Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng yesterday indicated that the trade surplus in March would show some change being compared with the previous two months. Statistics released by the General Administration of Customs today still alarms the outside world.

China's trade surplus was US $6.87 billion in March, the first time for it to fall below $10 billion since last March, sharply dropping $16.888 billion from the record high in February of this year, indicating a decrease of 71.09 percent.

According to statistics, the total import and export volume registered $159 billion in March, of which exports amounted to $83.4 billion, imports totaled $76.5 billion, and trade surplus marked $6.87 billion.

In addition, trade surplus size of the first quarter this year was lower than the third and the fourth quarter of last year.

In February this year alone, the trade surplus reached $23.757 billion, an increase of nearly 870 percent.

Gao Hucheng yesterday said that the reason for the higher trade surplus in the first two months was because of the time of this year's Spring Festival holiday being later compared with previous years. It resulted in faster growing of trade surplus in the first two months. But that did not mean that the trend would expand further.

Earlier, Gao predicted that with the newly propagated export rebates policy and the gradual implementation of the new measures to facilitate imports, some changes can be noticed in the situation of high trade surplus.
 
 
Fibre2fashion, News Desk - China