Event: according to the data released by the General Administration of customs, in March 2022, China's total import and export value was 504.79 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 7.5% and 15.9% from January to February. Among them, the export volume in March was US $276.08 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14.7% and 16.3% from January to February; The import volume was 228.7 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 0.1% and an increase of 15.5% from January to February; The trade surplus was US $47.38 billion, compared with us $115.96 billion from January to February.
The brief comments are as follows:
I. The export growth rate decreased slightly in March, which is mainly affected by the following factors: first, the epidemic prevention and control measures in Shanghai were gradually increased in March. As the largest port in China and even the world, the export freight will inevitably be affected. Considering that Shanghai's epidemic prevention measures were mainly upgraded after late March, this impact was not fully reflected in the export data in March, which may be one reason why the year-on-year growth rate of exports in March was only slightly downward.
Second, with the gradual repair of overseas industrial chains, the substitution effect of China's export commodities has weakened accordingly. In addition, the export base of last year is high, and there is a downward trend in export growth this year. In fact, this trend has appeared at the beginning of the year. It is normal for export growth to continue to decline in March.
Third, at present, China's major export destinations such as the United States and Europe are experiencing high inflation, and the prices of China's major export commodities are rising. This also supported the growth of export volume in March to a certain extent. According to the data of March, the growth rate of exports of shoes, ceramics, steel, mobile phones, integrated circuits and other commodities was significantly higher than that of exports.
On the whole, China's exports still maintained a double-digit high growth trend in the first quarter, indicating that the advantage of "made in China" is still obvious against the background that the global epidemic has entered the third year. This also indicates that in addition to April, the downward trend of China's export growth will be relatively mild in the future, and it is still expected to achieve a positive growth of about 5.0% in the whole year. Considering that the scale of trade surplus in the first quarter reached the highest level in the same period in history, after deducting price factors, we estimate that the driving force of net exports on GDP growth in the first quarter will remain at about 1 percentage point, and will continue to maintain a positive driving force of 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points in the second quarter. Affected by the current cold of real estate and the disturbance of economic activities by the epidemic, the downward pressure on China's economy has increased. Under this background, foreign demand is becoming an important factor in stabilizing the macro-economic market.
In addition, at present and for some time to come, the overall export continues to operate strongly, which will form a strong support for the RMB exchange rate. Under the situation that the Federal Reserve accelerates the pace of tightening monetary policy and China's steady growth objectively requires a moderately loose monetary and financial environment, this will provide an important support point for China's monetary policy to adhere to "focus on me".
II. In terms of import, the import volume in March decreased by 0.1% year-on-year, and the growth rate decreased by 15.6 percentage points compared with the cumulative growth rate from January to February. The import growth rate in that month changed from up to down, and the decline range was obviously large, which exceeded the market expectation. This is particularly noticeable in the context of the recent surge in international commodity prices such as crude oil and the increase in upstream raw material import demand driven by China's stable investment. In addition to the obvious high base in the same period of last year (the year-on-year growth rate of imports in March 2021 was as high as 39.1%), combined with the recent trend of China's epidemic and the tightening of local prevention and control measures, we believe that short-term factors such as the delay of import declaration caused by epidemic prevention and control may be the main reason for the higher than expected decline of import growth in March. This also means that the import data in April may continue to be low. However, after the current round of epidemic subsides, the import growth rate will soon return to positive, and a round of rebound process is expected.
Further, China's foreign trade still has the obvious characteristics of "large in and large out", and the proportion of processing trade is close to 40%. This means that the strong export itself will form a strong pull on imports. Therefore, the growth rate of import volume in March fell too fast, and there was the first year-on-year negative growth since August 2020. It should be a short-term fluctuation phenomenon, which does not mean that there was a significant contraction in import demand.
