Commercial trade between China and the Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries (CPLP) member states fell 25.62 percent in the first half of this year to close at EUR43.36 billion (USD48.3 billion) according to data from the country’s Customs Services quoted on the Forum Macau website.
The details show that in the first six months of this year, China imported goods totaling 25.75 billion euros – down 35.38% – and sold products worth 17.6 billion, down 4.53% in annualized terms.
Brazil remained far and away the largest Portuguese language speaking trade partner of China even with a 19.3% fall in trade through to June.
The 30.85 billion euros in trade was made up of 13.4 billion in Chinese exports, down 7.99% year-on-year whilst Chinese imports from Brazil stood at 17.41 billion, a drop of 26.24%.
Angola did take in an additional 2.77% of imports from China with trade bound for the Southwest African country accounting for 1.92 billion of the 9.39 billion euros total trade exchanged between the two countries and down 45.24% on the first half of 2014.
China’s imports from Angola accounted for the remaining 7.46 billion euros with the largely oil based exports down 51.16% in accordance with the slump in international crude prices.
In terms of Portugal, China’s third most important Portuguese language trading partner, there was a 5.89% slide in trade to close the first half at 1.93 billion euros with Chinese exports slipping 4.14% to 1.27 billion whilst Portuguese exports to China dropped 9.12% year-
on-year to amount to 658.6 million.
Taking June as the timeframe, trade between China and the CPLP totalled 8.82 billion euros, up 13.47% year-on-year.
China established the Special Administrative Region of Macau as its platform for boosting trade and cooperation with Portuguese language countries in 2003 and in that year correspondingly established Forum Macau as a means to achieve this goal. MDT/Lusa
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