On July 21, Liangjiang New Area Administrative Committee in Chongqing Municipality, announced that in the first half of this year, the total import and export trade in the district reached 147.9 billion yuan ($23.68 billion), an increase of 83.7 percent year-on-year, accounting for 55.3 percent of the city's total import and export trade of 267.49 billion yuan.

Trades with Hong Kong and ASEAN were the fastest growing areas. According to customs statistics, in the first half of the year, the export trade in Liangjiang New Area reached 79.35 billion yuan, an increase of 43.1 percent year-on-year and the import trade reached 68.55 billion yuan, an increase of 1.7 times compared with the same time last year. In dollar terms, the total throughput in the first half year was $24.13 billion, an increase of 87.6 percent.

In June only, the total import and export value reached 26.69 billion yuan, an increase of 28.9 percent compared with the same period in the previous year and an increase of 20.2 percent on a month-on-month basis. Of this, the export value reached 14.68 billion yuan, an increase of 42.2 percent on a month-on-month basis and the import value reached 12.01 billion yuan, a growth of 1.2 percent on a month-on-month basis.

In the first half of this year, the total processing trade in Liangjiang New Area was 99.69 billion yuan, an increase of 2.6 times, indicating that processing trade is in a leading position. Private enterprises' total imports and exports reached 79.55 billion yuan, an increase of 96.4 percent, accounting for 53.8% of total imports and exports of the district.

Within the same period, foreign-invested enterprises'total throughput reached 44.53 billion yuan, an increase of 43.6 percent and 13.25 billion yuan for state-owned enterprises, an increase of 1.2 times.

Among all trading partners, trades with Hong Kong and ASEAN increased faster than others. Hong Kong scooped the top place with a trading value of 37.87 billion yuan – an increase of four times, followed by ASEAN, with a trade value of 26.48 billion yuan, an increase of 77.1 percent.

Trade with South Korea reached 18.9 billion yuan, an increase of 10.5 times, while for the United States, the total throughput was 11.36 billion yuan, an increase of 22.8 percent.

From an industry perspective, in the first half of this year, portable computer exports reached 29.11 billion yuan, an increase of 42.6 percent. Exports of motorcycles reached 1.62 billion yuan, an increase of 2.4 percent. Exports of auto parts reached 1.29 billion yuan, an increase of 18 percent.

Meanwhile, imports of integrated circuit and automatic data processing equipment and parts increased significantly.

By Huang Pei

Edited by Brian Salter