China is expected to replace the US this year as the largest exporter of goods to Japan, a news report said yesterday.
According to the report in the Japanese financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun, imports of electrical machinery and appliances from China will likely exceed those of textile products for the first time on the back of soaring imports of personal computers and television sets.
The surge in imports from China, which marked Wednesday the one-year anniversary of its entry into the WTO, also comes at a time when Japanese companies are rushing to enter the Chinese market and are exporting a large number of products from that country.
The rapid increase in Chinese imports seems to demonstrate that nation's increasing dominance in the world market as well as the growing interdependence of the two countries, the report said.
Imports from China, excluding those from Hong Kong, totaled Japanese Yen 6.31 trillion (US$51.3 billion) from January through October, surpassing Japanese Yen 6.04 trillion in imports from the US and Japanese Yen 4.51 trillion from the EU during the same period, according to the report.
With imports from China continuing to flood the Japanese market in November and this month, Chinese imports are set to surpass imports from the US in value terms for the first time since the Ministry of Finance began compiling such data in 1961, the report added.
Although imports from China represented slightly more than 60 per cent of those from the US in 1999, they jumped 22 percent in 2000.
And Chinese imports grew 18 percent last year to Japanese Yen 7.03 trillion, just Japanese Yen 640 billion below total imports from the US, the report said.
Imports from China rose 9 percent in the January-October period, and are expected to post double-digit growth on an annual basis, the report said.
Imports of electrical machinery exceeded those of textile products in the January-to-October period, totaling Japanese Yen 2.09 trillion and representing 33 percent of overall imports from China to Japan.
Meanwhile, Japan's exports to China totaled Japanese Yen 4.02 trillion in the January-to-October period, rising above Japanese Yen 4 trillion for the first time.
Lat year, Japan's exports to China totaled Japanese Yen 3.76 trillion.
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