Boss Chang's enterprise is a leading enterprise in local clothing production in a coastal city, and the private economy is very developed. Its products are mainly underwear for men and women and baby clothes under 2 years old. Mr. Chang has worked in the garment foreign trade industry for 23 years. At present, there are more than 2,000 employees in the factory, and nearly 65,438+10,000 people from downstream supporting enterprises follow him to "eat".
"Our overseas customers are mainly large supermarkets in the United States, Canada and Australia, so the total plate is that big, either yours or mine." Boss Chang is very worried recently.
In fact, this is only a microcosm of a large number of domestic and foreign trade orders flowing out of the Southeast Asian market in recent years: at present, it is facing many practical difficulties such as blocked supply chain and rising costs.
In this regard, the General Office of the State Council recently issued "Opinions on Promoting the Stability and Quality of Foreign Trade", which clearly put forward 13 policies and measures to promote the smooth transportation of foreign trade goods. The Ministry of Commerce, together with 27 departments including the Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the People's Bank of China and the General Administration of Customs, has studied and promulgated a series of relevant policies and taken concrete measures to ensure the main body, order, market, confidence and performance.
"With the release of a series of stable foreign trade policies, the local government has conducted many surveys and listened to the opinions of entrepreneurs." Boss Chang said that these are all good signals.
rise to the occasion
Since he started his business, Mr. Chang has experienced the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the global financial crisis in 2008 and the global COVID-19 epidemic since 2020. For the previous two major crises, he said that not only has it not been affected, but the business volume has also been greatly improved.
According to his memory, 1997 China was in a period of vigorous development of foreign capital, with little influence; The price of raw materials rose sharply in 2007, which was difficult at first. Although the order signed at that time was actually a loss, Chinese enterprises were very honest and guaranteed the supply of goods to overseas customers. By 2008, these foreign customers had placed more orders in the cooperative factories in China. By 2009, due to the falling prices of raw materials, China enterprises actually made a lot of profits. Take Chang Boss's enterprise as an example, the business volume has increased by more than 20%.
Even in 2020, because China controlled the epidemic earlier, some orders originally made in other countries in Southeast Asia went to China garment foreign trade enterprises, so "life is ok". But this year, he felt a little pessimistic. In the communication with peers, it is generally believed that this decline has not bottomed out.
Mr. Xiaocao, who works as an OEM for an international clothing brand, also encountered such a problem.
Xiaocao Corporation, established in the early 1990s, is a family business. She told reporters: "I have just gradually taken over in recent years, and the current situation of increasing income is under great pressure. I realized that we must accelerate the transformation. "
According to the data released by the General Administration of Customs on April 13, in the first quarter, China's export value increased by 15.8% year-on-year, which was obviously slower than last year. The industry expects the growth rate in the second quarter to be around 8%. According to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on April 30th, the purchasing managers' index (PMI) of manufacturing industry was 47.4% in April, down 2. 1 percentage point from the previous month. Among them, the new export order index and import index dropped to 4 1.6 and 42.9 respectively, which were 5.6 percentage points and 4 percentage points lower than that of the previous month, indicating that the foreign trade boom was further weakened.
"Now we don't talk about' profit' with international customers. Can only say the expected' loss'. Even if we know that we will lose 1.5% ~ 2%, we are willing to take the order. " When explaining the reasons, Chang Boss said: The orders they receive from overseas big customers are generally basic models with a single style, which is not too high in terms of processing difficulty and requirements for workers, and foreign trade enterprises can easily do it. Therefore, if the loss is not too great, considering that it is not easy to get big customers on the one hand, and it is not easy to recruit skilled workers on the other hand, we can only "bite the bullet". If the production line stops, both customers and workers have to pick it up.
In view of the difficulties encountered by foreign trade enterprises in production and operation, the state has recently intensively introduced a series of policies to ensure stability.
In particular, Wang Shouwen, Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy Representative of International Trade Negotiations, mentioned at the regular briefing of the State Council policy on June 8 that the measures currently taken are to optimize and innovate the online exhibition mode, build national exhibitions, professional exhibitions and special exhibitions, and help enterprises get more foreign trade orders. For small and medium-sized enterprises, it is encouraged to negotiate with foreign customers online at home and transport products overseas for offline commodity display. Strengthen the linkage and mutual promotion between the online Canton Fair and the cross-border e-commerce platform to facilitate business transactions.
Financial support
In addition, the large fluctuation of RMB exchange rate also makes the operators of foreign trade enterprises a little difficult to deal with. Boss Chang said that the recent devaluation of RMB has really promoted foreign trade enterprises, but due to the violent fluctuations, these enterprises with large overseas orders are still somewhat helpless and have no good ability to resist exchange risks.
This problem that bosses often encounter has attracted the attention of relevant departments. On May 26th, the Ministry of Commerce, the People's Bank of China and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued the Notice on Supporting Foreign Trade Enterprises to Improve their Exchange Rate Risk Management Capability, which further detailed the specific requirements for accelerating the improvement of foreign trade enterprises' ability to cope with exchange rate risks, and demanded that exchange rate hedging products and services be improved to further enhance the convenience of RMB cross-border settlement. The circular requires local people's banks and branches of foreign exchange bureaus to encourage banks and guarantee institutions to reduce the hedging costs of enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. Conditional places can explore special credit, data credit enhancement, public deposit and other ways to reduce the credit occupation and capital occupation of enterprises.
At present, Mr. Xiaocao's company will use some financial instruments to lock in foreign exchange. "Because it takes at least half a year from receiving the order to delivery, it is necessary to avoid the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on the business during this period. Financial instruments can help enterprises manage a large part of risks. " She said.
In addition to financial instruments, more financial preferential policies, including credit, taxation, insurance and futures, are helping enterprises tide over the difficulties in an all-round way.
According to Wang Shouwen, fiscal, taxation and financial support are being strengthened. Including expanding the short-term insurance scale of export credit insurance, especially for small and medium-sized micro-foreign trade enterprises, it is necessary to further improve the scope of protection and shorten the time for claim settlement. In particular, it also supports some banking institutions not to blindly cherish loans, withdraw loans, cut off loans and suppress loans, sort out a list of small and medium-sized micro-foreign trade enterprises that are in urgent need of funds, and give key support in terms of funds.
On June 6th, China Banking Association issued the Proposal on Actively Strengthening Financial Services to Stabilize the Economy in an All-round Way. Among them, it is proposed to raise the credit supply. It also requires member units to meet the reasonable and effective credit demand of industrial enterprises temporarily in trouble due to the epidemic, further promote cooperation between banks and enterprises, strengthen cooperation with government financing guarantee institutions, strengthen trade services such as cross-border settlement, financing and hedging for foreign trade customers, and continuously increase support for stabilizing foreign trade financing.
In addition, in view of the shortage of transportation capacity, the State Council has also begun to request the Shanghai Futures Exchange and Dalian Commodity Exchange to step up research and promote the listing of shipping freight and transportation capacity futures.
At present, the situation of insufficient transportation capacity has also begun to recover. According to the data released by the Ministry of Transport on June 1, since May, the national port waterways have been smooth and efficient. In May, the cargo throughput of national key monitoring ports was 65.438+0.03 billion tons, down by 0.7% year-on-year and increasing by 3.2% daily. The container throughput was 23.08 million TEUs, up 4.2% year-on-year and 4.4% daily.
Migration and transformation
From the perspective of competitiveness, European and American customers generally report that cooperative enterprises in China have high integrity, good quality and high cost performance, and their service satisfaction with business partners in China is also the highest. Some enterprises in Southeast Asian countries are inferior to those in China in "hard conditions" and "soft conditions".
However, due to various factors, these large overseas customers consider more factors than usual when placing orders with China enterprises, and ask these China enterprises that have cooperated for many years to set up factories in Southeast Asia.
Mr. Xiaocao said that foreign customers rated China enterprises as "good, fast and cheap", so they were "still willing to give us orders", but they should make diversified changes in the supply chain.
"Therefore, we have also begun to do market research, continue to communicate with overseas customers, and actively respond to changes. Orders have begun to show signs of returning." Grass is a general term.
"Considering some trade policies of their own countries, these overseas customers suggested that we had better set up factories in Africa. If so, they are even willing to raise the price by more than 10%, but for China enterprises like us, it is not realistic to set up factories in Africa. " Boss Chang told CBN that he has been to many African countries, where the labor force is really cheap, with a monthly salary of almost $50, but the local power and transportation capacity are insufficient, making it difficult to obtain raw materials.
For Vietnam, which is talked about the most at present, Mr. Chang thinks that it is not necessarily a good place for domestic traditional clothing manufacturers. He has also visited Vietnam many times. Some previous policies were really attractive, but in the past two years, Vietnam has been reluctant to attract traditional industries such as textiles, and they also hope to attract high-end industries. Moreover, the production capacity provided by local enterprises in Vietnam is basically saturated, and the monthly salary of Vietnamese skilled workers is nearly 4,500 yuan, which is not cheap.
In order to help foreign trade enterprises like regular bosses more effectively, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce recently mentioned that in order to fully ensure the stability of the supply chain of the foreign trade industry chain, it is necessary to expand the development space of the foreign trade industry. Give full play to the role of foreign trade demonstration and pilot platforms such as foreign trade transformation and upgrading base, cross-border electronic commerce comprehensive experimental zone, import trade promotion and innovation demonstration zone, border trade processing pilot, investment promotion platform such as national economic development zone, free trade pilot zone, free trade port and other high-level open platforms, continuously optimize the business environment, continuously improve the level of trade liberalization and facilitation, enhance the attractiveness of global resource factors, and expand foreign trade industrial space.