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TDM Insight: China is Becoming a ‘Factory for Factories’

UncategorizedAugust 14, 20260Comments

Another Strong Month The Artificial Intelligence revolution gets the headlines and is being credited for another robust trade month. In July, Chinese exports increased 23.9% year-on-year to $397.9 billion. Its monthly surplus was $112.5 billion, putting it on track for another trillion-dollar annual surplus. “Export and import values remain elevated, helped by soaring global demand…

China’s New Record: Over 1M Cars Exported in a Month

UncategorizedJuly 29, 20260Comments

China released eye-popping June trade numbers on Tuesday. “A bit insane,” said Brad Setser of the Council of Foreign Relations, on X. Overall, Chinese exports increased 27% year-on-year to $412.4 billion. Imports expanded even more, by 36% year-on-year, to $286.8 billion. Chinese officials attributed the spike to the new artificial intelligence economy. “With the rapid growth of…

Vietnam’s Superpower: Versatility

UncategorizedMarch 27, 20260Comments

Vietnam’s Moment in (Trade) Time The wars in Iran and Ukraine, and trade turmoil around the world, especially involving the U.S. and China, have obscured what continues to be one of the essential trade stories of the century: Vietnam’s export growth. The Asian country of 102 million has staged an epic comeback since the 1970s…

Global Trade is Moving On — Without the U.S.

UncategorizedJanuary 20, 20260Comments

One way of looking at China’s trade economy in December and for the full 2025 year is its export surge, amplified by a weak currency, deflation at home, and inflation in most of the rest of the world. China pumped up total monthly exports 6.6% to $357.8 billion in December from $335.6 billion over the…

TDM’s Top 10 Trade Trends to Watch in 2026

UncategorizedJanuary 13, 20260Comments

Happy New Year. While we wait on the Supreme Court to rule whether the Trump administration is entitled to apply tariffs on national security grounds, global trade grinds on. We at Trade Data Monitor are paying attention to what’s happening via the prism of official trade statistics. It’s a radically different world than when I started covering…

Chinese Exports Down 1.1% in October

UncategorizedNovember 12, 20250Comments

The Chinese export juggernaut finally started to show the impact of protectionism and weaker Western consumer markets in October. A week after Presidents Trump and Xi settled a new trade deal that cut tariffs and put off their trade war for a year, China reported a 1.1% year-on-year drop in exports to $305.3 billion. To…

Casualties of the U.S.-China Trade War: 36 Million Phones

UncategorizedSeptember 17, 20250Comments

Please Dial a New Number As U.S. and Chinese negotiators try to find a way out of tariff gridlock, one thing is certain: The smartphone supply chain has shifted significantly, upending the practices and expectations of manufacturers, logistics firms, and retailers. China’s exports of mobile phone fell 11.6% year-on-year in August to 60.8 million sets.…

Global Coal Trade is Finally Faltering

UncategorizedAugust 25, 20250Comments

China Cuts Coal Imports For years, as governments around the world embraced clean energy technology, coal trade held steady because China was still buying. As the rest of the world turned away from coal, China boosted imports to power its booming electrification, and a vibrant new industry of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2024, it…

China Ramps Up Exports to Vietnam Amid Transshipment Worries

UncategorizedAugust 7, 20250Comments

Made in Vietnam (or China) At a time when trade officials around the world are closely watching Vietnam’s evolving place in the global trading system, Chinese exports to the new Asian economic power in June boomed 23.8% year-on-year to $16.3 billion. The U.S.-China trade war has pushed attention of U.S. trade negotiators toward manufacturing powers…

China Reconfigures Export Markets as Shipments to U.S. Plummet

UncategorizedJune 19, 20250Comments

U.S. Market Collapsing For China As Americans and Chinese officials scrambled to forge new politically acceptable trade terms, China reported a pandemic-level decline in exports to the U.S. Chinese shipments to the U.S. fell 34.4% year-on-year in May to $28.8 billion, the steepest drop since Covid-19 upended global trade in February 2020. Chinese imports from…

China Finally Affected by Protectionist Tariffs

UncategorizedOctober 23, 20240Comments

September Rain China posted lackluster trade figures in September, highlighting how it might become slowly less reliant on global commerce as other major economies retrench. Chinese exports increased 2.4% year-on-year, below economists’ expectations of around 6%, to $303.7 billion, while imports increased only 0.3% to $222 billon. The 2024 Boom For most of 2024, Chinese…

How Tariffs Are Reshuffling EV Trade

UncategorizedJuly 11, 20240Comments

Age of the EV We’re entering the age of the electric vehicle, and global trade is keeping pace. Around 20% of all cars bought in the world in 2023, a total of almost 14 million, were electric, and there are now 40 million on the road, according to the International Energy Agency. Total trade in…

TDM Insight: Vietnamese Exports Rebound in 2024

UncategorizedMay 15, 20240Comments

After a tepid recovery in 2023, Vietnam’s trade machine appears to be firing on all cylinders so far in 2024. The country boosted exports 16.8% year-on-year to $92.9 billion in the first quarter, underpinning gross domestic product growth of 5.7%. This is no coincidence. Vietnam’s export sector is key to its economic growth. It is…

China’s EV Export Boom is Driving up Demand for RoRo Ships

UncategorizedApril 15, 20240Comments

China’s electric car export boom has fueled demand in the country for automobile transport ships, driving up prices for foreign buyers. Overall, in March, Chinese ship exports fell 5.9% year-on-year by quantity in March to 399, after steadily rising for most of this decade. By value, they increased 34% to $3.1 billion. So called Roll-on/roll-off,…

China Reboots Trade Thanks to Africa, India, Latin America

UncategorizedMarch 11, 20240Comments

Don’t let anybody tell you that globalization is dying—at least, not yet. Global trade economists obsess over consumer demand and rising protectionism in the U.S. and Europe, but this week’s release of Chinese trade statistics shows that other markets might soon be catching up in relevance. The Promise of Other Markets China’s exports to Latin…

What’s Behind the High-Tech Trade Slump?

UncategorizedFebruary 16, 20240Comments

It’s not been an easy time for international trade, as a recent report co-authored by Trade Data Monitor and the World Intellectual Property Organization found. High-tech exports are set to decline by 4 percent in 2023, according to the TDM/WIPO analysis. Global and high-tech trade have soared and sunk like rollercoasters since 2019. After…

China Hikes Iron Ore, Copper Imports Amid Car Building Boom

UncategorizedJanuary 23, 20240Comments

In the somewhat gloomy December and annual China trade statistics released in the second week of January was buried a piece of data that hearkened back to the boom years of Chinese commodity consumption: China is buying a lot more iron ore and copper. In December, China boosted iron ore imports 11.1% year-on-year to 100.9…

TDM Data Used to Scrutinize Impact of Steel and Aluminum Tariffs

UncategorizedNovember 15, 20230Comments

Trade scholars in a recent paper used Trade Data Monitor data on steel and aluminum trade to gauge the impact of 2018-2019 protectionist measures on U.S. and European Union imports. The paper by Simon Evenett and Fernando Martin, published by the Center for European Policy Research, found that because the U.S. and European Union…

China Boosts Imports of Raw Materials by Double Digits

UncategorizedNovember 13, 20230Comments

China in October dramatically increased imports of fossil fuels, industrial metals and agricultural commodities, a run on raw materials that if sustained will have a major impact on prices and supply chains. China continued to increase its ferocious energy consumption, hiking imports of natural gas 120.1% year-on-year to 8.8 million tons, coal 23.3% to 36…