Trade situation still weak: experts
China's exports in June climbed for the first time in four months, according to data released on Monday, but experts said the country's overall foreign trade situation remains relatively weak.
In June, China's foreign trade slipped 1.9 percent year-on-year to 2.07 trillion yuan ($330 billion), data released Monday by the General Administration of Customs (GAC) showed.
Meanwhile, exports reached 1.17 trillion yuan in June, up 2.1 percent from a year earlier, but imports declined for the eighth consecutive month, sliding 6.7 percent year-on-year in yuan-denominated terms. The figures both for exports and imports were well above market forecasts.
As a result, China's trade surplus came to 284.2 billion yuan in June, up 45 percent from the previous month.
Experts generally attributed the unexpected recovery in exports last month to improved overseas demand thanks to the recovering US economy as well as a weaker yuan during the same period.
The 2.1 percent growth in June exports ended three months of export declines, which could signal that the weakness in China's foreign trade is bottoming out, Zhang Liqun, a macroeconomics research fellow with the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times Monday.
"With the world economy stabilizing, particularly in the US, external demand has been improving," Zhang said.
"Meanwhile, as China's central and local authorities have rolled out various measures to boost exports and imports over the past few months, these support policies have helped the foreign trade market," Zhang noted.
Zhang also noted that such support measures may continue to offer momentum for export growth in the second half.
But Qu Hongbin, an economist at HSBC, pointed out that although the contraction in imports narrowed in June, it still reflected slackness in China's domestic demand.
The GAC statistics also showed that in the first half of this year, the country's foreign trade came to 11.53 trillion yuan, down 6.9 percent compared with the same period in 2014. The figure is well below the country's annual foreign trade target of 6 percent growth for 2015.
Exports rose 0.9 percent year-on-year to 6.57 trillion yuan during the first six months of this year, while imports fell by 15.5 percent to 4.96 trillion yuan.
As regards the second half, Huang Songping, a spokesman for the GAC, said at a press conference Monday that external demand was still relatively sluggish, which will bring some uncertainty for the country's export outlook.
Although both imports and exports were better than expected in June, China's overall foreign trade situation remains relatively weak, according to a research note Huatai Securities sent to the Global Times Monday.
"With the recovering external demand and weaker yuan due to domestic monetary easing, exports are likely to stabilize in the near future," Yu Pingkang, chief economist with Huatai Securities, said in the note.
"But on the imports side, as domestic fundamentals still look weak, Chinese demand for imports will not see a quick expansion. More monetary easing policies are needed to boost the real economy," Yu said.
In an effort to support the slowing economy, China's central bank on June 27 lowered lending rates for the fourth time since November and cut banks' reserve requirement ratio.
