Hong Kong’s trade promotion body said on Monday the city’s exports this year would suffer their largest decline in a decade due to the impact of the ongoing trade war between China and the United States.
The Hong Kong Trade Development Council predicted that the city’s exports would shrink 4 per cent by value, the worst performance since 2009 when they plunged 12.6 per cent during the depth of the global financial crisis. The forecast marked a significant downgrading of a previous prediction that exports would grow 2 per cent in 2019.
The outlook came on the same day China’s Customs Administration published a detailed breakdown of trade data showing that shipments from the mainland to Hong Kong fell 7.7 per cent in the first eight months of this year, compared to the same period in 2018 – a faster rate of decline than the 6.3 per cent drop in the first half of the year.
China’s overall overseas shipments rose 0.2 per cent between January and August, indicating a weakening of the city’s role as a primary conduit for Chinese transshipments to end consumer markets in the US and European Union.
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