China’s exports surged 17.7 percent last month to snap a 13-month falling streak, state television said yesterday, cementing the Asian power’s new status as the world’s biggest exporter.
Exports hit US$130.7 billion during the month, bringing the full-year export figure to US$1.20 trillion, China Central Television (CCTV) said, quoting figures from the General Administration of Customs.
Data out of Germany last week showed that China overtook Europe’s biggest economy in November to become the world’s top exporting nation.
PHOTO: AFP
Last month’s data broke a long string stretching back to late 2008 in which monthly Chinese exports had contracted as foreign markets dried up in the global economic downturn.
CCTV quoted a top customs official as saying the figures indicated the worst was over for China’s vital export sector.
“This is an extremely important turning point. Our nation’s foreign trade had been falling for 13 consecutive months but is now growing,” said Huang Guohua (黃國華), head of the customs bureau’s statistical analysis department. “Our nation’s exporters have emerged from their downslide.”
Overall foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9 percent last year to US$2.21 trillion, the data showed, as monthly exports fell sharply on a year-on-year basis in each of the first 10 months of the year.
But that changed in November, when exports slipped just 1.2 percent, the slowest decline of the year.
Imports for last month reached US$112 billion, while full-year imports came in at US$1.005 trillion.
The figures provided by CCTV indicated the nation’s politically sensitive trade surplus hit US$18.4 billion last month, while the full-year surplus came to US$197 billion.
Last year’s trade surplus was down 34.2 percent from 2008, Xinhua news agency said.
With China’s trade figures for all of last year now public, the nation’s crowning as last year’s export champion is expected to be confirmed when Germany releases full-year trade figures on Feb. 9.
From January to November, Chinese exports were worth US$1.07 trillion, while data from the German national statistics office on Friday showed that exports from the European heavyweight amounted to US$1.05 trillion.
Experts have said a resurgence in Chinese trade will likely bring renewed pressure on China to let its yuan currency appreciate.
The value of the yuan, which has effectively been pegged to the US dollar since mid-2008, has been a bone of contention between Beijing and its Western trading partners, who say it keeps the currency low to boost exports.
While Beijing has acknowledged the need to boost domestic consumption and reduce the country’s reliance on exports and investment to drive the economy, it has so far refused to budge on its currency policy.
Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said last month in an interview with state media that China would not yield to foreign pressure on the yuan.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts