According to the January statistics of export and import trade issued by the General Administration of Customs in February, China's total import and export value reached 2.34 trillion yuan (equals to 385.8 billion USD), a year-on-year increase of 7.3 percent, among which the export value was 1.27 trillion yuan(equals to 209.3 billion USD), a year-on-year increase of 7.6 percent; and the import value was 1.07 trillion yuan (equals to 176.4 billion USD), a year-on-year growth of 7 percent.

Some institutions previously predicted that in January China's export value would have a 2 percent year-on-year increase and the import a 6 percent increase.

According to analyses, in January China's export to Japan and the EU had a substantial growth, which was largely benefited from the increasing PMI in the manufacturing sectors of Japan and the EU. With the moderate recovering of the developed economies, China's export still has room for growth.

According to Zhu Haibin, Chief Economist of J.P. Morgan China, the export sectors of China may benefit from a comparatively favorable environment and the export to developed countries may have an obvious growth in 2014; meanwhile, the continuous appreciation of the yuan and the dim perspective of emerging markets may exert negative influence on China's export industry. To sum up, Zhu predicts that China's export industry will enjoy a moderate improvement in 2014, with a year-on-year growth of about 11 percent, hopefully the fastest growth since 2011.

Bai Ming, deputy director of international research department of the Chinese Academy of International Trade & Economic Cooperation, said: "Don't be overjoyed by the January trade data. This year's foreign trade may have a better performance than last year, and the growth may be a little higher than the general economic growth. But we need to further observe the trend."

According to statistics, China and its main trade partners have a strong growing momentum in import and export. According to Bai Ming, China needs to pay more attention to the EU, ASEAN, Brazil and India in 2014.

Firstly, the EU market is slowly recovering. Though the economic recovering of the Europe is slower than the US, the growth of China-European trade is faster than China-US trade. So the China-European trade has a great potential in 2014.

Secondly, ASEAN countries have a competitive edge in the cost. Due to the continuous appreciation of the yuan, the cost increase and other factors, China's manufacturing sector's ability to attract foreign investments is weakening. Meanwhile, some low-cost ASEAN countries have a dramatic increase in absorbing foreign capital. ASEAN countries are becoming favorable destinations for the relocation of manufacturing enterprises.

Besides importing energies and minerals, China's engineering and machinery enterprises have paid more and more attention to the markets of Brazil and India. Along with the diversification of China's investments abroad, emerging markets are expected to become the new export highlights.

Wang Tao, Chief Economist of UBS Securities China, believes that with the declining of currencies of emerging economies, and the steady appreciation of the yuan against the USD, the yuan's real effective exchange rate against a basket of currencies will keep increasing. If such trend continues, the export of China will face the downward pressure.

The article is edited and translated from《今年外贸增速有望高于经济增速》, source: People's Daily, author: You Zhixin and Du Haitao.