China’s exports better than expected in September

In this July 1, 2015 photo, trucks move shipping containers in the container pool of a seaport in Qingdao in eastern China’s Shandong province.

The China Customs Bureau said on Tuesday imports declined 17.7 in September from a year earlier, while exports were down 1.1 per cent over the same period.

Beijing has targeted annual growth for this year at about 7%, the slowest in a quarter century.

But that was an improvement on August’s decline and significantly better than the 6 percent drop forecast in a survey of economists by Bloomberg News. But a number of economists believe China will struggle to reach that level amid weak export demand, a continuing property slump and growing bad debts on the books of its big state-owned banks and local governments.

Much of China’s slowdown over the past five years was self-imposed as the ruling Communist Party tries to steer the economy to more self-sustaining growth based on domestic consumption. That meant China reported its largest ever trade surplus of nearly $US60 billion.

“This suggests that domestic demand may have softened”, though part of the decline is due to a drop in global commodity prices, which makes foreign goods cheaper, he said.

Chinese trade data for September has come in mixed, with a surprisingly resilient performance from exports being largely overshadowed by another sharp plunge in imports. Economic growth held steady in the quarter ending in July at 7 percent.

Shipments over the first nine months fell 29.8 percent to 156.36 million tonnes, with foreign suppliers struggling to compete in a massively oversupplied market.