Trade alert

  • Australia: 1 meat production company suspended exports to China. The General Administration of Customs of China announced on March 29 that it will suspend the acceptance of import declarations from Australia’s JBS AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED (registration number 1614) for one week from now on.

Trade

  • India: Edible oil prices rose sharply in India due to disruptions in sunflower oil supplies from Ukraine. Indian traders recently ordered 45,000 tons of sunflower oil from Russia at a record high price, and the deliveries are expected to ease the tight supply situation in the Indian edible oil market. 60% of India’s edible oil needs to be imported. India and Russia are actively negotiating payment issues and hope to pay in their own currencies as soon as possible.
  • India: Russian coal exports to India hit record. Recently, India’s steel minister said that India intends to double the amount of coking coal imported from Russia. Coal exports from the Russian Federation to India in March may have reached their highest level in two years, with 1.06 million tonnes of coking and thermal coal from Russia expected to arrive at Indian ports in March, consulting firms estimate.
  • Belarus: Plans to increase exports to China by rail. Interfax reported on March 29 that the Belarusian Ministry of Agriculture and Food said that it plans to increase food exports, while the logistics supply channel with China will be replaced by railway transportation.
  • Thailand: Resume export of chicken products to Saudi Arabia. Recently, Thailand restarted the export of chicken products to Saudi Arabia after 18 years. Thailand is one of the world’s major exporters of chicken products and has the largest chicken processing plant in Asia, the report said.
  • Jordan: Allow the dairy industry to use milk powder, issue import licenses to milk powder importers, and study the possibility of importing cows.
  • Ethiopia: Plans to expand highways over the next decade. According to a recent report by the Ethiopian News Agency, the Ethiopian Highway Foundation stated that Ethiopia plans to expand the highway in the next ten years, and the total length will increase from 301 kilometers to 1,600 kilometers.
  • Japan posted a trade deficit for the seventh consecutive month. A few days ago, Japan’s Ministry of Finance announced that Japan’s trade deficit in goods in February was 668.3 billion yen (about 5.4 billion US dollars), the seventh consecutive month of deficit. Among them, the import value of goods increased by 34.0% year-on-year to 7.86 trillion yen, and the export value increased by 19.1% year-on-year to 7.19 trillion yen.

Industry

  • China Economic Net: With the support of the metaverse concept, NFT (non-fungible tokens) ushered in explosive growth. NFT has expanded from the encryption circle to the art circle and the Internet circle, and the market size is rapidly expanding. Institutional reports show that the size of the NFT market in 2021 has reached at least 26.9 billion US dollars, or about 170 billion yuan. Domestically, the Internet giant Ali’s Ant Chain took the lead in opening the layout, and Tencent, Byte, and JD.com joined later. One of their common features is that “hype is strictly prohibited”, and some have replaced “NFT” with other titles.
  • Gartner: NFTs are emerging as a way to multiply business models. The value proposition of NFTs is based on the willingness of buyers to pay more for digital artefacts in a network of like-minded individuals. By 2024, 50% of public companies will have some kind of NFT that underpins their brand and/or digital ecosystem. NFTs will become a powerful marketing tool that supports the influence of the digital ecosystem and accelerates the growth of the market value of enterprises.
  • Securities Times: In January, the number of independent NFT buyers exceeded 895,000, a record high, with a year-on-year increase of nearly 3,000%; in February, it dropped to 796,000, the first time it fell below 800,000 since the NFT market broke out. At the same time, the trading volume from retail investors accounts for 80% of the NFT trading market.

China Industry

  • Energy Bureau: issued the “Guiding Opinions on Energy Work in 2022”. In 2022, the country’s total energy production will reach about 4.41 billion tons of standard coal, about 200 million tons of crude oil, and 214 billion cubic meters of natural gas. To ensure sufficient power supply, the installed power capacity will reach about 2.6 billion kilowatts, the power generation capacity will reach about 9.07 trillion kilowatt-hours, the new peak power generation capacity will be over 80 million kilowatts, and the power transmission capacity of “West-East Power Transmission” will reach about 290 million kilowatts.
  • Smartphone sales in China fell 20.5% year-on-year. According to statistics from CINNO Research on the 29th, the sales of smartphones in the Chinese market in February were about 23.48 million units, down 20.5% year-on-year and 24.0% month-on-month. OPPO and Honor ranked first and second in domestic smartphone sales, respectively.
  • Dr. Lilac: In 2021, people will have an average of 4.8 health problems, and the top 3 are emotional, physical and skin problems. Sports and fitness, knowledge of diet and nutrition, and popular science of common diseases are the three types of health content that citizens pay the most attention to.
  • Recently, many paper companies have raised the prices of white cardboard products. Among them, Chenming Paper and Bohui Paper both plan to increase the price of their white cardboard products by 300 yuan/ton on the basis of the current price starting from April 1. The recent increase in the price of wood pulp is the main reason for this round of price hikes for white cardboard. Currently, the spot price of hardwood pulp in Shandong is about 6,170 yuan/ton, up more than 20% from the beginning of the year.
  • Maoyan: On March 28, the operating rate of theaters nationwide was 46.55%, with 5,585 operating theaters, a decrease of 182 from the previous day, and a large box office of 13.186 million.

Company

  • Amazon is slashing Prime membership fees. Existing Prime customers whose monthly or annual plans renew will have their bank statements marked with the new price: the new monthly rate rises by $2 to $14.99, while the annual rate rises by $20 to $139, an increase of more than 16%.
  • DHL announced the acquisition of Hillebrand for $1.65 billion.
  • Apple announces reduction in iPhone SE production. A few days ago, Apple announced that due to the uncertainty of the situation in Russia and Ukraine, it plans to reduce the production of the iPhone SE in the next quarter, which will be reduced by 20% compared with the original plan.
  • Kuaishou: In 2021, revenue will be 81.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.9%; adjusted net loss will be 18.85 billion yuan, compared with a loss of 7.86 billion yuan in the same period last year. In 2021, the total e-commerce transaction volume (GMV) will reach 680 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 78.4%, and the total usage time of users on e-commerce-related content will increase by more than 50% year-on-year. In the fourth quarter, DAU reached 323 million, a year-on-year increase of 19.2%; MAU ​​reached 578 million, a year-on-year increase of 21.5%.
  • Himalaya: In 2021, revenue will be 5.86 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 43.7%, and gross profit margin will increase from 49.1% in 2020 to 54.0% in 2021. Among them, subscription revenue was 2.99 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 49.0%; advertising revenue was 1.49 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38.8%; live broadcast revenue was 1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 39.6%. The average monthly active users were 268 million, a year-on-year increase of 24.4%, of which the average monthly active users of the mobile terminal reached 116 million.

World

  • Housing rents in major U.S. cities hit an all-time high in February. Rents for homes with less than two bedrooms rose to an all-time high, up an average of 17.1 per cent year-on-year. The three largest increases over the year were all in Florida, with Miami, Orlando and Tampa seeing increases of 55.3%, 35.4% and 32.3%, respectively.
  • The U.S. Senate passes the China Competition Act. On the 28th local time, the U.S. Senate passed a bill aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness against China in the economic and national security fields, as well as funding U.S. semiconductors. The bill would allocate $45 billion to improve U.S. supply chains. Prevent shortages of key commodities such as semiconductors by restoring U.S. domestic employment and thus emptying production. China firmly opposes this.