Brazil’s main customer, China loses space in the 2022 trade balance

After securing more than 30% in 2020 and 2021, the share of China in the Brazilian trade balance exports fell to 26.8% last year, a trend greatly influenced by the drop in the value of iron ore shipped. The participation is also smaller than in 2019 when the country took in 28.7% of Brazilian exports.

However, China is still the leading destination of Brazilian exports, followed by the United States, with 11.2%, and Argentina, with 4.6%. Experts predict that China will regain its lost share of Brazilian shipments in 2023, albeit only partially, within a broader context of a global economic slowdown.

See below Brazil’s top exports to China in the first eleven months of 2022. The data is from the DataLiner business intelligence service.

Top exports to China | Jan 2022 – Nov 2022 | WTMT

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

Compared to 2021, the US share of Brazilian exports remained stable, up just 0.1 percentage points. Argentina, which should be President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first official travel destination in this term, advanced 0.4 percentage points, but still far from the 7.5% obtained a decade ago.

With the drop in shipments to China, the trade surplus with the Asian country ended at US$ 28.97 billion in 2022, equivalent to almost half the sum of US$ 61.76 on the Brazilian balance. Despite being robust, the China-Brazil trade surplus was less than US$ 40.26 billion in 2021, equivalent to two-thirds of the Brazilian balance of US$ 61.41 billion.

The 4.5 points difference in Brazilian shipments to China between 2021 and last year was diluted among several other trading partners. In addition to Asian countries like India and Singapore, the European Union and Latin American countries such as Chile, Mexico, and Colombia also increased their share.

In 2023, the performance of the Chinese economy will be an essential variable for how Brazilian exports unfold, says economist Livio Ribeiro, a partner at BRCG and a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Economics at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV Ibre). For him, it is possible that China will recover part of the share in Brazilian exports in 2023, but not entirely.

Considering the expected global slowdown scenario, José Augusto de Castro, president of the Brazilian Foreign Trade Association (AEB), projects exports of US$ 325.2 billion for 2023, which would mean a drop of 2.9% compared to 2022.

Source: Valor Econômico 

To read the full original article, please go to: https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2023/01/16/principal-cliente-do-brasil-china-encolhe-na-balanca-de-2022.ghtml

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