The Internal And External Environment Is Still Grim And The Traditional Competitive Advantage Is Weakening.

After more than a year's downturn, China's exports increased by 18.7% in March compared with the same period last year, and maintained a positive growth rate of 4.1% in April.

it is thought that

The "cold winter" has passed and bottomed out.

Is that so?

Recently, journalists visited Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Chongqing and other places to get a close understanding of the latest changes in China's foreign trade enterprises.

The survey found that the current situation of our foreign trade is still grim, and business operations are facing many difficulties. We can not simply use the "bottom up rebound" to describe foreign trade.

However, there is no need to worry too much about the decline in the growth rate of foreign trade.

We may turn the focus from "quantity" to "quality". Only by taking the structural reform of supply side as a guideline and promoting enterprises to accelerate the formation of new advantages in international competition, can we expect to see a strong rebound in foreign trade again.

In recent years, the cost of labor, land and other factors has been rising, especially in coastal areas. The labor cost of workers in the coastal areas is 4 to 6 times that of neighboring countries.

Traditional export competitive advantage has been weakening, and some export orders and industries have shifted to emerging economies.

In 2007, the proportion of China's processing trade in exports was 50.7%, which has dropped to 32.9% in the first quarter of this year.

In 2010, China's share in the import market of the United States and Europe's power intensive products reached 50.6% and 47.9% respectively, down to 47.1% and 43.6% in 2015 respectively, while some emerging economies in China continued to rise in the US and EU market share.

Zhao Qingming, chief economist of the China Financial Futures Exchange Research Institute, believes that China's emerging industries are developing faster, and the export of capital goods such as large scale complete sets of equipment is better than the whole. However, there is still a gap between the developed countries and the developed countries. In the short term, it is difficult to make up for the downturn in the export of traditional dominant products.

China's foreign trade is unlikely to achieve a "V" or "U" trend in the short term.

"Fewer orders, more difficulties, more difficult days."

Zhang Quan, the head of a CNC machine tool manufacturer in Beijing, told our reporter that in the past few years, the business status of the export of CNC machine tools was generally good. By 2014, 1/3 was basically losing money, 1/3 was flat, and 1/3 was profitable.

Last year, 1/3 companies stopped working, and fewer and fewer companies were making profits.

After two consecutive years of high growth, China's foreign trade has been pressing for two years.

Last January, when the total volume of imports and exports dropped by over 10%, the trend of foreign trade continued to be low, and the total import and export volume decreased by 7% year-on-year.

In the first 2 months of this year, foreign trade suffered another 6.6% or 20.6% decline.

In March, the turnaround appeared to have increased by 18.7% in the month, the first two digit growth since February last year, and the 4.1% positive growth in exports in April.

At the same time, the decline in imports over the past two months has narrowed compared with the previous month.

There is a view that

Foreign trade is bottoming out and is expected to rebound strongly.

"Although foreign trade urgently needs to end the long winter, it is too early to judge the turning point by two months' data. There is a more reasonable expectation."

Li Guanghui, vice president of the Ministry of Commerce, said.

Shen Danyang, spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce, said March

A substantial rebound, on the one hand, is seasonal factors. Due to the February Spring Festival, exports either go ahead or push back, there is uncertainty; on the other hand, the base factor is the base factor, the export volume in March last year is the lowest in all the months of the year. In March this year, although the export increased by 18.7% year on year, only 1 trillion yuan is not ideal.

Reporters found in the survey, no matter from the perspective of international demand, or from the perspective of domestic enterprises, there is no sufficient reason to support the judgment of "strong rebound in foreign trade".

"Orders did not increase significantly in the first quarter."

Li Mei, owner of a toy manufacturing enterprise in Chongqing, said that since last year, her company's orders have been fluctuating considerably, and overall there has been a sharp decline. In the first quarter of this year, orders fell by about 10%.

The external demand downturn has not fundamentally improved.

Recently, the Ministry of Commerce has 3000 families in the country.

A questionnaire survey was conducted, and 57.7% of enterprises thought the export situation was more severe this year.

The International Monetary Fund recently lowered its global economic outlook again, with the global economy expected to grow by 3.2% in 2016.

According to WTO statistics, global import volume dropped by 12.2% in 2015.

In the first two months of this year, the world's 71 main economies accounted for about 8% of the world's total trade volume by 8% over the same period last year.

The international trade environment is also not optimistic.

Global protectionism is heating up and the external policy environment facing China's foreign trade is tightening.

China's exports suffered 37 trade relief surveys in the first quarter, an increase of 55.6% over the same period last year.

"EU anti-dumping policy has a great impact on enterprises."

Xin Jiansheng, chairman of Tianjin Fujida Group Limited, said that some European countries even went against WTO's regulations in order to protect the interests of their own industries.

It is difficult for enterprises to solve similar problems. Most of the time, they can only abandon the corresponding market.

From the domestic situation, although the traditional development kinetic energy of foreign trade still has room for improvement, the new development kinetic energy is taking shape, but from the traditional competitive advantage to the shifting period of the new competitive advantage of international competition, the growth rate decline is still inevitable.

"The cost is low, but in emerging countries, brands are less developed than developed countries, and sandwiches are not easy to live on."

Guo Bin, the owner of a toy trade enterprise in Shanghai, said that before we took the order, it was a toy that we could make a price of ten yuan or 20 yuan. We could do it for a few yuan.

Now that we have more than ten yuan to make toys, some countries in Southeast Asia have done a few dollars, so we can only watch some orders "slip away".