Mainland China allows individuals to engage in foreign trade on July 1

Taipei, June 30, 2004 (CENS)-- Starting July 1, mainland China will implement a new trade law that will allow individuals to apply for engaging in foreign trade, and will enforce other new laws stipulating that foreign exchange settlement on foreign debts by foreigners will not be allowed to reimburse renminbi-nominated debts.

And a written mandate is required if the value of a single foreign exchange settlement is over US$200,000.

Wu Hsin-hua, deputy director general of Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), said that the mainland authority's new trade law allowing individuals to conduct trade in the mainland will be a momentum to traders in both sides of the Taiwan Strait. He emphasized that the law is immediately beneficial to the current mini direct trade between the mainland and Taiwan's offshore islands--Kimen and Matsu.

In the first four months of this year Taiwan's trade with the mainland totaled US$18.35 billion, up 33% from the same period of last year. During the period, Taiwan's imports of thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panels rose eighteenfold.

In the same period, Taiwan's exports to the mainland came to US$13.64 billion, up 29% from the corresponding figure of last year and commanding a 25.35% share of the island's total exports, with the ratio up 1.3 percentage points from a year earlier.

Taiwan's imports from the mainland amounted to US$4.71 billion, a sharp annual growth of 48.4% and accounting for 9.2% of the island's total imports, up 1.1 percentage points. Taiwan enjoyed a trade surplus of US$8.93 billion in the first four months of the year, an increase of 20.7% over one year earlier.

In April alone, Taiwan 's exports to the mainland saw an annual growth of 32% to US$3.66 billion and imports rose 37.3% to US$1.25 billion, leading to a trade surplus of US$2.41 billion in favor of Taiwan.

In terms of items, the major exports included electric machinery, optical components, machines, plastic products, steel & iron, organic chemicals, and synthetic fibers; which together accounted for 84.4% of Taiwan's total exports to the mainland.

As for imports, the major items were information technology (IT) products, TFT-LCD panels, semiconductors & related micro components, and light emitting dioxide (LRD). Of which, portable digital automatic processors and printed circuit boards (PCB) registered a whopping annual import growth of 106% and 303%, respectively.