While China's foreign trade stabilized in the second quarter, exports will be under downward pressure in the current quarter amid "a severe and complex" domestic and global economic environment, the customs administration said on Wednesday.
In yuan-denominated terms, China's foreign trade contracted 3.3 percent year-on-year to 11.13 trillion yuan ($1.66 trillion) in the first half of this year, data released by the General Administration of Customs (GAC) showed on Wednesday.
Exports reached 6.4 trillion yuan, down 2.1 percent from a year earlier, while imports declined 4.7 percent to 4.73 trillion yuan. The trade surplus came to 1.67 trillion yuan, up 5.9 percent year-on-year, according to the GAC figures.
Huang Songping, a spokesman for the GAC, said at a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday that both exports and imports fell in the first half, but there was an obvious recovery in the second quarter compared with the first.
First-quarter exports and imports fell 5.7 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively, while in the second quarter, exports gained 1.2 percent and the decline in imports narrowed to 1.2 percent.
Pointing to dollar-denominated figures, experts noted that China's foreign trade remained sluggish in June.
Exports went down 4.8 percent in dollar terms, expanding from a 4.1 percent decline in May, while imports dropped 8.4 percent in June from the 0.4 percent slip of the previous month.
"The relatively poor trade data pointed to the continuation of weak momentum," Liu Dongliang, a senior analyst at China Merchants Bank, wrote in an e-mail sent to the Global Times on Wednesday.
Even without a significant slump in commodity prices in May and June, the decline in imports expanded sharply, indicating that a deterioration in domestic demand again emerged.
That doesn't bode well for the economy in the second half, Liu noted.
"In volume terms, imports of iron ore and crude oil remained strong, but weakening domestic industrial activity and investment suggest that a fundamental improvement in domestic demand is not underway. Strong oil prices earlier in the year also eroded oil and chemical industry profits, thus weakening imports in June," Su Yue, China economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing, told the Global Times in an e-mail on Wednesday.
As regards the third quarter, Huang said that China's exports will again face significant downward pressure amid a severe and complicated international and domestic environment.
Huang also cited several uncertainties affecting foreign trade, such as the UK's Brexit vote, an expected U.S. interest rate hike, global economic turmoil, the geopolitical situation and terrorism threats.
"Prospects for China's export sector are relatively bleak. The uncertainty generated by Brexit could cast a pall over demand in the EU, China's largest export market," Su noted.
Liu agreed, saying that China's foreign trade environment is unlikely to improve in the second half of this year, given the still sluggish economies in Europe and Japan as well as a series of problems brought by Brexit.
Those factors will make it hard for trade to support economic growth.
The National Bureau of Statistics is due to release China's GDP growth data for the second quarter on Friday. GDP growth in the first quarter was 6.7 percent.
The central government has set the GDP growth target for 2016 at a range between 6.5 percent and 7 percent.
