China’s services trade fell in the first five months this year amid the Covid-19 pandemic, but the trade structure kept improving with a narrowing deficit, said Gao Feng, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce (MoC).
The services trade totaled 1.87 trillion yuan (US$264.8 billion) during the period, down by 14.6% year on year, said Gao.
Services exports amounted to 759.26 billion yuan in the January-May period, down by 2.3%, while imports decreased by 21.5% year on year to 1.11 trillion yuan.
Meanwhile, the services trade deficit stood at 350.08 billion yuan, dropping by 285.15 billion yuan from the same period last year.
The MoC highlighted strong resilience in China’s trade of knowledge-intensive services, which jumped by 8.7% year on year.
In contrast to the merchandise trade, trade in services refers to the sale and delivery of intangible products such as transportation, tourism, telecommunications, construction, advertising, computing and accounting.
Express delivery
BEST Inc, a supply chain service provider headquartered in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province, said it had launched logistics services in Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore.
The company plans to build 400 express delivery stations and 12 transshipment centers in three years in the three countries.
BEST Inc has established logistics networks in five Southeast Asian countries so far, which also include Thailand and Vietnam, and expects to enter the markets in Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future.
The transshipment centers in Kuala Lumpur and Phnom Penh will be equipped with the latest automation devices to ensure highly efficient sorting, weighing and scanning procedures, according to the company.
BEST Inc expects to have an increasing number of local consumers in Southeast Asian countries to experience the same convenience of fast delivery services as in China, said Zhou Shaoning, chairman and CEO of BEST Inc.
According to recent research results released by the Development & Research Center of the State Post Bureau, Southeast Asian countries have become the most popular investment destinations of Chinese logistics companies.
Importing chips
Shenzhen-listed Inspur Information said Intel Corp, a US chip giant, would resume component shipments to the company in about two weeks after a temporary stoppage and said its business operations currently run as normal.
The company’s comments came after Intel said it had temporarily paused shipments to Inspur to comply with the US government’s new export regulations.
Intel said in a statement that the move is temporary and would last less than two weeks for some items, while other product shipments will resume in a matter of days. It said it will resume shipments as soon as it can do so while ensuring compliance with US laws.
Inspur is the largest server maker in China. It accounted for 37.6% of China’s server market and 9.6% of the global server market in the first quarter of this year, according to data from market research company Gartner.
Inspur was placed on a list of 20 Chinese firms with alleged military links by the US government on June 25, which prompted Intel to halt component shipments.
Financial disclosure from Inspur Information shows that Intel is the company’s largest supplier of chips. In 2019, Inspur spent more than 17.89 billion yuan on purchasing components from Intel.
Huawei Technologies
Huawei Technologies’ autonomous network management and control system – iMaster NCE – stood out among eight global mainstream suppliers and was ranked the only WAN SDN controller leader three consecutive times, according to the latest report, WAN SDN Controller: Competitive Landscape Assessment, released by GlobalData in June.
GlobalData is the world’s leading provider of data insight solutions. Covering more than 80 countries and gaining insights into more than 500,000 companies worldwide, GlobalData has more than 25,000 industry experts and opinion leaders, as well as more than 740 analysts and consultants.
In this report, GlobalData defines criteria from six dimensions (product scope, openness, product performance, major system components, solution breadth and deployment readiness), as well as defines five levels (leader, very strong, strong, competitive and vulnerable) for each dimension.
Using these criteria, GlobalData assesses and analyzes WAN SDN controllers that function as network management and control platforms and provides comprehensive assessment results.
The story was written by Xu Jiangshan and Liu Licong and first published at ATimesCN.com. It was translated by Nadeem Xu.