
Chinese exports plunge 25% in February - mgdo
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35751586
======
tim333
Sounds scary but:

"""

According to Julian Evans-Pritchard, an economist at Capital Economics in
Singapore, the severe fall in exports largely reflected changes in the timing
of the Lunar Year in China this year.

"In 2015, the holiday fell unusually late which meant that more of the pre-
holiday rush to meet orders and less of the post holiday disruptions took
place in February, causing exports to jump 48.9 percent year-on-year," he
said.

"""

~~~
jordanb
One holiday puts exports down double digits for two months in a row eh? Must
be one crazy party.

~~~
fatjokes
It's the largest mass human migration on earth, and it happens annually.

~~~
discordance
There's a good documentary that covers this migration -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Train_Home_(film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Train_Home_\(film\))

------
Mikeb85
Not too long ago I pointed out an increase in anti-China propaganda. Seems
this definitely is the case.

A 25% drop from a 50% increase the year before (due to what is probably one
of, if not the biggest holidays in the world) is still an increase from 2
years prior. Anyhow, this is just funny timing things.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/exports](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/exports)

If you set the chart to 10 years, you'll notice it's more or less in line with
the average. If there is a slowdown (hard to tell), it's fairly mild, and
would be more or less consistent with worldwide demand. It's just very
dramatic for one month because of the holiday.

In a year, I have no doubt that, contrary to what some observers are claiming,
China will be alive and well.

~~~
bsdpython
It probably has little to do with anti-China propaganda. Financial news has
always reported junk like this with clickbait headlines and a few cherry
picked numbers to make a story from nothing.

------
wrong_variable
HN LOVES the idea of bad things happening.

As someone who's clients are all Chinese - there is not a better time to be in
the Chinese market.

China is quickly translating into a service powerhouse, I wouldn't be
surprised if china will stop needing wallstreet to finance itself within the
next 5 years.

If you are in the SaaS business - china is where you need to be to make bank.
Chinese millennials are rich, optimistic and are amazingly good adopters of
technology.

The chinese software market is also extremely young - unlike the saturated
western ones. So even building simple service-automation/web-service will make
you millions.

Its almost laughable to me these days that an amazing company like netflix can
only charge 5 dollars in america while in china people are spending insane
amount of money online for really simple services.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"Its almost laughable to me these days that an amazing company like netflix
can only charge 5 dollars in america while in china people are spending insane
amount of money online for really simple services."

I'm not sure where you get this impression. Online services in China are
extremely competitive. Netflix is $8 per month in the US, or $10 per month if
you want HD. Tencent video in China is 20RMB (~$3) per month. Most of their
content is available for free if you don't mind ads.

Another comparison:

\- Dropbox: 1TB for $99 per year.

\- Baidu Yun: 5TB for $15 per year.

~~~
Cerium
Incomes in China are largely equal in number to about double the number,
disregarding currency conversion. For example a low end worker in the USA
makes 1000 USD a month while a similar worker in China makes 1000 rmb. A fresh
graduate engineer may make 5k USD a month in the USA and may make 2500 to 10k
rmb depending on skill and location in China.

That said 20 rmb should not be considered 3 dollars, it should be viewed as 10
to 20 dollars.

Some more points of comparison: Average hotel 100 rmb, breakfast 10 rmb, cell
phone bill (depending on data) 50 to 200 rmb.

~~~
idra
These prices are simply not true. 1000 USD per month in the US will get you
much more than a 1000 RMB in China. For 100 RMB you can only find a roach and
mold infested hole in a tier 3 city, there are no hotels at this price in
cities like Beijing or Shanghai. Yes, you can buy a jianbing on the street for
10 RMB or less, but it is the equivalent of buying a street hot dog in New
York and calling that "breakfast". Something a sane person can call breakfast
will be at least 20-30 RMB, still with no guarantees that your food isn't
cooked in recycled gutter oil.

------
gruez
Title is misleading. From the second line of article:

Exports dropped sharply by 25.4% _from a year earlier_

I'm not sure about anyone else, but "exports plunge 25% in February" makes me
think that it plunged 25% from January to February.

~~~
rahimnathwani
It's common (in the economics/financial press) to refer to year-on-year
changes in this way. This article is in the mainstream press, though, so
perhaps they should have spelled it out.

------
base
Link Bait title. They didn't plunge 25% in February. This is a 25% plunge from
the same time last year.

~~~
forgetsusername
When did the new meme become calling everything link bait? These metrics are
measured year over year, so there's nothing remotely misleading about it.

------
Animats
Fortune: "In February 2015, exports jumped 48%. So this February exports were
up against a strong performance last year."

The 25% number needs units. Is that in yuan, dollars, or TEU?

The Port of Los Angeles publishes container statistics in TEU.[1] February
isn't up yet, though. January was up 33% over last year. So this isn't showing
up at the physical container level. Container statistics are useful because
they're actual counts, not some kind of estimate.

[1]
[https://www.portoflosangeles.org/Stats/stats_2016.html](https://www.portoflosangeles.org/Stats/stats_2016.html)

------
RP_Joe
"Customs figures showed exports fell to $126.1bn (£88.5bn) last month. That
was down 25.4% from a year earlier and worse than an expected fall of about
15%. "

But if you are measuring this in USD, and the deprecated yuan means more
volume for less dollars.

------
a3n
It'd be cool if the US and other involved countries weren't so wary of China
militarily. If we didn't have to counter their military, that could free up
money to buy more of their exports.

It seems kind of silly to threaten, however obliquely, your customers.

~~~
vinceguidry
Different orders of magnitude. We spend approximately $600 million every year
on countering all conventional military threats, all over the world. China
exports around $2T worth of goods every year. China dropping the ball
militarily would not affect our priorities at all.

~~~
samcheng
Sorry, but your figure is wrong. The annual US Military budget is about $600
Billion, not $600 million. That's 3.5% of US GDP and a non-trivial amount;
it's more than the entirety of US trade with China (imports in 2015 were $481
billion). It's half of US Government discretionary spending.

[https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-
spendi...](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spending-
united-states/)

[https://www.census.gov/foreign-
trade/balance/c5700.html](https://www.census.gov/foreign-
trade/balance/c5700.html)

~~~
vinceguidry
I made a typo about the figure, sorry about that.

People throw around these facts, comparing them to one another, without really
understanding the scales involved.

Half of discretionary government spending _should_ be on the military. Sure,
other countries that _rely on bigger nations for their defense_ can get away
with much smaller defense budgets, but a powerful hegemonic nation whose
stability the entire world relies on needs a dominant military, and those
aren't cheap.

The primary role of a state that is serving its people and not the other way
around is foreign policy and defense. What kept the Roman Empire alive for so
many centuries was that other nations simply feared to openly challenge it
militarily. Even banding together, they could not hope to withstand Roman
legions.

You made another comparison, that military spending is larger than the whole
of China's trade with the US. That's irrelevant, it only means that the US is
in a completely different league economically than China.

Government spending is ultimately limited by its nation's economy. A command
economy can spend more on things relative to the nation's GDP, but that limits
the potential for the command economy to grow. This undeniable fact has driven
China's domestic policy for decades. China has to modernize into a more
liberal economy, otherwise it won't be able to survive. But it hasn't quite
done that yet.

The US, on the other hand, has had for its entire run a liberal economy, and a
GDP to match. The US economy is so vast, so enormous, that just the 1.75% of
it we spend on the military is more money than a lot of countries' entire
economies. It really is that big.

------
stuaxo
Hrm, austerity everywhere, wages down .. unsurprising ?

------
antoniuschan99
I was in Hong Kong on Lunar week. There was a lot of Chinese (Mandarin)
speaking people during that time. It was very crowded!

