According to the information from Customs, the total foreign trade of Yunnan witnessed a big jump in the first quarter of the year, reached US$1.82billion, rose by 35.2% year-on-year, the increase is 11.9 percentage points higher than the national average, and is listed at No. 19. The import volume reached US$0.94billion, climbed by 34.4%; and the export increased 36% to US$0.88billion.
Statistics shows that the total import and export of Yunnan realized through general trade reached US$1.48billion in the first quarter of the year, with a big jump of 79.9% year-on-year, which was 81.7% of the total foreign trade of Yunnan; while the trade volume of processing industry saw a big drop of 54.1%, which was only US$0.145billion. The trade with ASEAN countries showed a rapid increase, with a rise of 45.5% to US$0.64billion in the first quarter of the year, occupied 35% of the total foreign trade in Yunnan; in addition, the trade volumes with Vietnam and Indonesia reached US$0.19billion and US$0.14billion respectively, climbed by 1.5 times and 1.7 times compared with the same period of last year.
Myanmar was always the biggest trade partner for Yunnan, but it was exceeded by Australia, Vietnam and Hong Kong, and fell to No. 4, the trade volume was US$0.16billion which dropped 8.7% year-on-year. In the first quarter, the trade volume between Yunnan and Australia was amounted to US$0.25billion, 1.4 times more than last year, which was mainly resulted from the growing import of copper mine; the trade volume with Vietnam was US$0.19billion, increased 1.5 times, and mainly because of the increase of the export of steel from Yunnan.
Looking at the categories of imported articles, the import volume of metal ore sand was the biggest, reached US$0.58billion and with a –year-on-year increase of 86.5%; meanwhile, the import of machinery and power-generating products witnessed a decline of 47.8%, realized US$83.95million, which was still with the second biggest import volume. In terms of exported articles, non-ferrous metal became the No.1, with an export of US$0.21billion and increased 30.4%; the export of machinery and power-generating products was the second biggest exported products after non-ferrous metal, with an export of US$0.12billion and a growth of 17.4%; agricultural products was the No. 3, with an export of US$0.1billion and a rise of 2% compared with the same period of last year.
April 13, 2007 (FRI) Yunnan Daily Page2