Japan’s exports rose year-on-year for the first time in 15 months last month, helped by brisk demand from booming China, which has become the top overseas market for Japanese goods, data showed yesterday.
Japan posted a trade surplus for an 11th straight month, calming worries that its economic recovery from the worst recession in decades is faltering due to renewed deflation and weak domestic demand.
Japan benefited from strong growth in Asian powerhouse China, which overtook the US last year to become Japan’s top export destination, a finance ministry official said.
Exports to China, which is on course to overtake beleaguered Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy, shrank 20.9 percent last year from the previous year to ¥10.24 trillion (US$114.3 billion).
The figure marked the first drop in 11 years but topped US-bound exports of ¥8.74 trillion, down 38.5 percent from a year earlier.
Last year, Japan’s total exports rose for the first time year-on-year since September 2008 as demand from China and other parts of Asia surged.
Exports rose 12.1 percent from a year earlier to ¥5.41 trillion while imports fell 5.5 percent to ¥4.87 trillion.
Japan’s trade surplus last month came to ¥545.3 billion, reversing a year-earlier deficit of ¥322.2 billion.
Japan’s Asia-bound shipments rose 31.2 percent in the month as exports to China alone soared 42.8 percent.
Japan logged a second straight quarter of positive growth in July-September on the back of rebounding exports and massive government stimulus spending.
“A V-shaped recovery in exports supported Japan’s economic recovery in 2009,” Monex Securities chief economist Naoki Murakami said in a note.
The trend of rising production and sales on the back of recovering exports remains intact, with developed nations tracking a rebound in fast-growing emerging economies such as China, he said.
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