XN000022-1997-03-13 — Page 15

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The Census and Statistics Department today (Thursday) released detailed statistics on external trade with breakdown by country/territory and commodity for January 1997.

Changes in the value of Hong Kong's re-exports to ten main destinations are shown in Table 1.

Comparing January 1997 with January 1996, increases were recorded in the value of re-exports to the United States (+11%), the Netherlands (+9.1%) Singapore (+6.9%), Taiwan (+4.4%), Japan (+3.6%), South Korea (+1.6%), the United Kingdom (+1,0%) and France (+0.6%).

However, the value of re-exports to Germany and China decreased by 8.6% and 1.8% respectively.

As the external trade figures for a single month at the beginning of each year tend to be fluctuating due to effects of the Lunar New Year holidays, it is more meaningful to make comparisons over a longer period.

Comparing the three months ending January 1997 with the three months ending January 1996, increases were recorded in the value of re-exports to Singapore (+14%), the United States (+11%), China (+6.4%), the Netherlands (+4.7%), France (+2.8%), the United Kingdom (+1.9%), Taiwan (+1.1%) and Japan (+0.6%).

However, the value of re-exports to Germany and South Korea decreased by 9.4% and 4.3% respectively.

Table 2 shows changes in the value of re-exports of ten principal commodity

divisions.

Comparing the three months ending January 1997 with the three months ending January 1996, more notable increases in the value of re-exports were registered for office machines and automatic data processing machines (by $4.2 billion or 25%); electrical machinery, apparatus and appliances, and electrical parts thereof (by $1.5 billion or 5.0%); clothing (by $1.3 billion or 5.6%); travel goods, handbags and similar containers (by $825 million or 9.7%); footwear (by $596 million or 3.7%); and miscellaneous manufactured articles consisting mainly of baby carriages, toys, games and sporting goods (by $355 million or 1.1%).

Over the same period, a more notable decrease in the value of re-exports was registered for plastics in primary forms (by $1.4 billion or 17%).

Changes in the value of domestic exports to ten main destinations are shown in Table 3.