China’s exports and imports fell more than expected last month, underlining weak demand at home and abroad and cooling hopes of a recovery in the world’s second-largest economy.
Exports fell 1.8 percent from a year earlier, the Chinese General Administration of Customs said yesterday, reversing the previous month’s brief recovery and supporting the government’s concerns that the foreign trade environment will be challenging this year.
Last month’s imports dropped 10.9 percent from a year earlier, falling for the 18th consecutive month, suggesting domestic demand remains weak despite a pickup in infrastructure spending and record credit growth in the first quarter.
“Both exports and imports came in weaker than expected, in line with the soft trade performance across Asia, pointing to another challenging year for emerging markets,” said Zhou Hao (周浩), senior emerging market economist at Commerzbank in Singapore.
China’s exports to the US — the nation’s top export market — fell 9.3 percent from a year earlier, while shipments to the EU — the second biggest market — rose 3.2 percent, customs data showed.
China had a trade surplus of US$45.56 billion last month, versus forecasts of US$40 billion.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected last month’s exports to fall 0.1 percent, after a surprise 11.5 percent rise in March, and expected imports to fall 5 percent, following March’s 7.6 percent decline.
The nation’s economic growth slowed to 6.7 percent in the first quarter — the weakest since the global financial crisis, but activity picked up in March as policy steps to boost the economy, including six interest rate cuts since late 2014, seemed to be taking effect.
Concerns about a hard-landing eased after the strong March data, but analysts have warned the rebound may be short-lived. Economists expect a slowdown in credit growth and industrial production for last month, although inflation could accelerate.
“The market has to prepare a little bit for the downside risk in other Chinese data and some sort of market correction might be inevitable,” Zhou said.
China’s central bank on Friday said that it would fine tune policy in a pre-emptive and timely way, as the economy still faces downward pressure despite signs of steadying.
Amid shrinking global demand, China still managed to grow its share of world exports to 13.8 percent last year from 12.3 percent in 2014.
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