Since the beginning of this year, the external environment of foreign trade development has been complicated and severe, the international economic and trade growth momentum has slowed down, and unilateralism and trade protectionism have intensified. In accordance with the CPC Central Committee and the State Council's work on maintaining stability in six areas, MOFCOM, together with various regional departments, vigorously explored diversified markets and optimized the international market layout, and issued a series of policy measures to achieve positive results.

In the first half of this year, the import and export maintained a steady development and contributed more to the national economy. According to customs statistics, in terms of RMB, import and export increased by 3.9% year on year, export increased by 6.1% year on year, and import increased by 1.4% year on year. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the contribution of net export of goods and services to GDP growth in the first half of the year was 20.7%, which was 1.5 percentage points higher than investment. Evaluated from this, net export boosted GDP growth by 1.3 percentage points. At the same time, the “five optimizations” of the international market layout, domestic regional layout, business entities, commodity structure, and trade methods have made positive progress. From January to June, the proportion of export to emerging and other markets outside the US, the EU, Japan and Hong Kong increased by 1.4 percentage points to 48.7%; that in the central and western regions increased by 1.1 percentage points to 17.5%; that of private enterprises increased by 3.2 percentage points to 50.7%; that of mechanical and electrical products accounted for 58.3%; that of general trade export increased by 1.7 percentage points to 58.7%.