BEIJING, July 21  -- China recorded a deficit of 55.2 billion yuan (8.97 billion U.S. dollars) in its foreign trade in services in June, official data showed on Monday.

The figure was up from a deficit of 50.9 billion yuan in May, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) said in a statement.

The country's total revenues from trade in services stood at 118 billion yuan last month, while expenditure hit 173.2 billion yuan, according to the statement.

In the first six months, the combined service trade deficit stood at 361.5 billion yuan, the SAFE said.

International trade in services refers to the cross-border sales and delivery of intangible products, including areas such as transport, travel, telecommunications, construction, insurance, finance and IT.

Although China overtook the United States to become the world's largest goods trader for the first time in 2013 and boasted a hefty surplus in trade of goods, a large deficit can be seen in its service trade.

The SAFE started to issue monthly data on trade in services in January to improve the transparency of balance of payments statistics.

Besides the trade data denominated in yuan, the administration also released another version of the data denominated in U.S. dollars on Monday.

Using the U.S. dollar denomination, China earned 19.2 billion U.S. dollars from the trade in services during this period, and spent 28.1 billion U.S. dollars, with a deficit of 9 billion U.S. dollars in international service trade.

In the first six months, the service trade deficit totaled 58.9 billion U.S. dollars.