Beijing: China suffered an across-the-board decline in trade in March, the government said today, days ahead of GDP data expected to show another slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.
Exports fell an unexpected 15.0 percent on-year in March to USD 144.57 billion, the General Administration of Customs said, while imports tumbled 12.7 percent to USD 141.49 billion.
The monthly trade surplus, which had hit consecutive records in January and February, plummeted 60.0 percent to USD 3.08 billion.
The export decline was far off what economists had expected, with a survey by Bloomberg News projecting an increase of 9.0 percent. The poll forecast a trade surplus of USD 40.1 billion.
Customs spokesman Huang Songping blamed the export slump on stepped-up factory deliveries ahead of a later start for China's Lunar New Year holidays than in 2014, saying factoring in seasonal effects the fall was only 4.8 percent.
Still, he acknowledged problems.
"International market demand was slack and export orders have declined," he told reporters. "Comprehensive costs remained high so that the traditional competitive advantages were weakened."
For imports, he attributed the weakness to commodity price falls and a downturn in domestic growth.
In the first quarter, overall prices of China's imports fell by 9.8 percent year on year, with those for key commodities iron ore, crude oil and refined oil dropping 45 percent, 46.8 percent and 38.7 percent respectively, according to Huang.
The figures come two days before China announces economic growth data for the first three months of the year, with a survey by AFP forecasting 6.9 percent expansion. That is sharply down from the 7.3 percent in October-December and the worst rate since January-February 2009, at the height of the global financial crisis.
Growth slowed to 7.4 percent in 2014, the weakest in 24 years, and the deceleration appears to have continued into this year as indicators including industrial production, consumer spending and fixed asset investment have slumped.
Beijing is trying to manage a delicate rebalancing of the economy to make growth more consumer driven and sustainable, but also making sure it does not slow so much that job growth is severely affected, which could cause popular discontent -- a key concern of the Communist Party.
For the first quarter, China's trade surplus soared more than 600 percent to USD 123.70 billion, Customs said, with exports up 4.7 percent to USD 513.93 billion and imports dropping 17.6 percent to USD 390.23 billion.
