Services import industry continues to grow and meet world-wide demand

China's Ministry of Commerce released a report on the services' imports sector at the China International Import Expo illustrating its growth and the country's relationship with its trade partners.

The nation’s services imports have not only met the needs of the Chinese people, for a better life and facilitated domestic industrial structural transformation and upgrading, but also brought new opportunities for global trade growth, said Xian Guoyi, head of the service trade department at the ministry.

From 2001 to 2017, China's services imports increased by 11 times, with an annual growth rate of 16.7 percent which ranked first among the world's major economies.

Since 2012, China has adopted a new vision for development and remained committed to improving the openning-up. Against a background of slow growth in world trade, the proportion of the country's services imports to the global figure rose from 6.3 percent in 2012 to 9 percent in 2017, with its world ranking jumping from the 10th to the second.

Over the past five years, with the average annual growth rate of global services’ imports being only 3 percent, China's services imports has maintained an average annual growth rate of 10.7 percent. The country's contribution to the growth of global services imports has reached 25.8 percent, a 4.2-percentage rise. 

China has been the world's biggest spender on outbound travel for six consecutive years. In 2017, the consumption of Chinese tourists was close to one-fifth of the total global travel revenue.

"It is expected that in the next five years, outbound travel will become an important direction for China's consumption upgrade with a scale of 700 million visitors, and travel services’ imports are expected to exceed US$1.4 trillion, becoming an important driver of the global economic growth," Xian said.

Meanwhile, China's services sector is becoming a new hot spot for global investment.

In 2017, foreign investment in the services sector was US$95.44 billion, accounting for 72.8 percent of the national total and an increase of 63.5 percent over the US$58.38 billion in 2012.

Information transmission, software and information technology services, the real estate industry, as well as leasing and business services, were the top three areas that attracted foreign investment, amounting to US$20.92 billion, US$16.86 billion and US$16.74 billion, respectively, accounting for 21.9 percent, 17.7 percent and 17.5 percent of the national total.

China has trade relations with more than 250 countries and regions in the services sector and will continue to support trade liberalization and economic globalization, actively open its market to the world, provide a business environment that is law-based, internationalized and business-friendly, and promote the building of an open world economy with concrete actions.

Top 10 sources for China's services imports are Hong Kong, the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, with a total services imports of US$339.87 billion, accounting for 72.7 percent of the country's total.

"In the future, China will further push forward the opening up to broader fields and a higher level and give priority to the development of trade in services, deepening the opening up of the services sector, increasing high-quality services imports, optimizing the facilitation system for services imports, improving the business environment, and strengthening the multilateral and bilateral cooperation on trade in services," Xian said.