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External trade statistics by country and commodity for March
The Census and Statistics Department today (Monday) released detailed statistics on external trade with breakdown by country/territory and commodity for March 1996 as well as for the first quarter of 1996.
As were already released on April 26, the value of re-exports decreased by 5.3% over a year earlier to $82.3 billion, the value of domestic exports by 19% to $14.4 billion, and the value of imports by 0.7% to $120.8 billion in March 1996.
A government spokesman said that, as indicated in the earlier release, a number of extraordinary factors were likely to have affected Hong Kong's export performance in the month of March. The cold weather in the United States, the expectation for import tariff cuts in China as from April, the tension across the Taiwan Strait in early March, and the late timing of the Chinese New Year could have combined to dampen exports in that month. As such, the dip in March was probably only temporary.
Changes in the value of Hong Kong's re-exports to 10 main destinations are shown in Table 1.
Comparing the first quarter of 1996 with the same period in 1995, increases were recorded in the value of re-exports to Japan (+32%), France (+13%), the United Kingdom (+12%), China (+11%), the Netherlands (+9.6%), Germany (+8.9%). Singapore (+7.8%) and South Korea (+3.2%).
However, the value of re-exports to the United States and Taiwan decreased by 2.9% and 0.8% respectively.
Taking all destinations together, the value of re-exports in the first quarter of 1996 was $259.7 billion, 8.2% higher than that in the same period in 1995.
Table 2 shows changes in the value of re-exports of 10 principal commodity
divisions.
Comparing the first quarter of 1996 with the same period in 1995, increases of various magnitudes were recorded in the value of re-exports of most principal commodity divisions. More notable increases were registered for office machines and automatic data processing machines (by $4 billion or 35%); electrical machinery, apparatus and appliances, and electrical parts thereof (by $3.2 billion or 13%); clothing (by $2.1 billion or 11%); footwear (by $1.5 billion or 11%); photographic apparatus, equipment and supplies, optical goods, watches and clocks (by $1.4 billion or 13%); and miscellaneous manufactured articles consisting mainly of baby carriages, toys, games and sporting goods (by $931 million or 3.5%).