The latest November data shows that China's exports far exceeded expectations, and foreign trade remains highly popular. How will this trend be interpreted in 2021?

How much China exported in November?

Due to the rebound of the second epidemic in Europe and the United States and its impact on production capacity, my country’s US dollar-denominated exports grew by 21.1% year-on-year in November, far exceeding the previous value of 11.4% and the market’s expected 9.5%, and the trade surplus rose to 75.43 billion US dollars. The product level has shown a high prosperity in full bloom.

In terms of export regions, there are four aspects of export boom in November:

First, the year-on-year growth rate of the United States, China's third largest trading partner, was as high as 46.1%, a new high for the year. There are two reasons: on the one hand,

The Sino-US trade friction caused the amount of China's exports to the US in November 2019 to be the low of the year, creating a low base effect this year; The manufacturing PMI has declined, but the peak season of Christmas consumption in the United States remained unchanged from November to December, and the demand for restocking from China was very strong, boosting my country's exports of consumer goods.

Second, the year-on-year growth rate of China's second largest trading partner, the EU, climbed to 8.6%, turning positive for the first time this year. In November, a new round of epidemics and blockades in Europe exacerbated the decline in supply. The increase in demand for epidemic prevention materials and consumer goods caused the gap between supply and demand to widen again, boosting China's exports to the EU from negative to positive.

Third, the year-on-year growth rate of ASEAN, China's largest export trading partner, remained at a double-digit rate of 10%, slightly lower than the peak of 14.4% in September. Since the second quarter, the impact of the epidemic has gradually become clear in ASEAN, but the epidemic is generally controllable and better than the world, the economy has restarted quickly, and the gap between supply and demand in ASEAN countries has narrowed, reducing the dependence on China's exports.

Fourth, the year-on-year growth rate of China's exports to Japan was 5.6%, maintaining positive growth for two consecutive months. Since entering the second quarter of 2020, the year-on-year growth rate of China's exports to Japan and the year-on-year growth rate of imports from Japan have both increased. While exports increased sharply, although imports declined in November due to the high base, the domestic production boom remained at a high level. In November, the domestic manufacturing PMI was 52.1%, up 0.7 percentage points from October, of which the import PMI index rose by 0.1 percentage points from October to 50.9%, which was generally in the expansion range. In November, my country's import value was 192.65 billion US dollars, a year-on-year The growth rate fell to 4.5% from 4.7% in October, mainly due to the high base in 2019. From the perspective of countries, the growth rate of China's imports from Japan, ASEAN and South Korea has rebounded, reaching 7.1%, 6.5%, and 5.9%, respectively; but the growth rate of imports from the United States and the European Union has declined to varying degrees, recording 32.7% respectively. % and 4.5%, which may be related to the repeated drag of the epidemic on supply capacity. From the perspective of the first 11 months, the scale of China's imports and exports remained the same as in 2019, the cumulative deviation of exports and imports increased, and the trade surplus increased significantly. From January to 11th this year, my country's total import and export value was 4.17 trillion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 0.6%. Among them, the total export value increased to 2.31 trillion US dollars, an increase of 2.5%; the total import value was 1.86 trillion US dollars, a decrease of 1.6%; the trade surplus in the first 11 months was 459.92 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 23%.