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| Opportunity Alert Taiwan Gov’t Contracts Open for Bids |
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| Strategic Hit Time to Test the Waters? |
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| Hot Topic U.S.-China Trade Conflict/Consensus |
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| Snap Shot Tide Turns East |
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More Resources
Cotton Ready to Rebound
Cotton and fabrics exports inched up by 0.5% in second-quarter 2009, according to PIERS Trade Horizons. This is a tiny gain, but good news after what one commentator called a year of “unprecedented demand destruction” during an exclusive Webcast from The Journal of Commerce (JOC), featuring presentations by W. "Neely" Mallory of Mallory Alexander International Logistics; Jordan Lea, Eastern Trading Company; and Meredith Allen, Staple Cotton Cooperative Association/Staple Cotton Discount Corporation. Demand should rebound since the inventory pipeline is totally empty, but the export infrastructure could be strained, they say. Click here to go to the JoC Webcast page, where October’s “Cotton Exports: A Changing Dynamic” is archived.
Shanghai Expo Set for May 2010
From May to October 2010, Shanghai will be hosting Shanghai Expo 2010. The U.S. pavilion will showcase U.S. products to a large market in East Asia. Starting with the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 in London, England, the fairs have been held about once every five years, under the auspices of the International Exhibitions Bureau, and this is China’s first ever. For more on Expo 2010, visit http://en.expo2010.cn. For information about the U.S. pavilion, visit www.usapavilion2010.com or contact Nick Winslow, tel.: 626 584 1660, e-mail: nick.scott@earthlink.net; or Ellen Eliasoph, tel.: 202 662 5777, e-mail: eeliasoph@cov.com.
New portal to Africa
A new portal to African trade opportunities at www.export.gov/africa provides links to the commercial sections of U.S. embassies in some 45 African countries; information on projects that are funded by multilateral donors; and schedules of trade shows, events and exhibitions. More information on U.S. trade with sub-Saharan Africa can be found in the International Trade Administration report, “U.S.-African Trade Profile,” available at www.agoa.gov.
FDI in U.S.
A report from the Department of Commerce, “Asian-Pacific Foreign Direct Investment in the United States,” focuses on 10 economies with a large FDI presence in the U.S.: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Trade Winds 2010: The Americas
The U.S. Commercial Services will be offering a series of Webinars aimed at briefing U.S. companies about the export opportunities, financing options and best prospects in the Americas region in the run-up to Trade Winds Forum 2010 in São Paolo, April 25–29. Click here for registration and purchase information.
About PIERS
PIERS — the Port Import Export Reporting Service — was launched by The Journal of Commerce over 30 years ago as its first venture in electronic information. PIERS is the primary source of U.S. waterborne import-export trade data and a leading provider of global intelligence solutions. Businesses that operate on a global basis rely on PIERS for the information they need to identify new markets, benchmark performance and calculate market share.
To learn more about PIERS, visit http://www.piers.com/.
Contact PIERS
Beth Adams
Marketing Director
tel.: +1 973 848 7151
email: info@piers.com |
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Opportunity Alert Taiwan Government Contracts Open for Bids |
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 With its accession this summer to the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Taiwan became the 41st country to join the plurilateral agreement to provide national treatment to the goods, services, and suppliers of the other members when awarding government contracts. (The accession also exempts Taiwanese suppliers from any discriminatory policies of the U.S., a fellow GPA member, including the Buy American requirements under the Trade Agreements Act of 1979.)
Taiwan’s participation in the GPA opens new opportunities for American suppliers. The country is implementing 12 major public construction projects — the “i-Taiwan 12 projects” — including an island-wide transportation network, a Kaohsiung Free Trade and Ecology Harbor, and building a Taoyuan International Aviation City.
For more about the WTO GPA, start with the WTO site on government procurement or the U.S. Trade Representative’s site.
The U.S. Commercial Service offers information about doing business with Taiwan, including FAQs about the Taiwan GPA that cover the timeline until the implementation date, covered procurements, tender thresholds and requirements for language, currency, licensing and certification.
To learn more about business opportunities for U.S. companies in Taiwan, go to http://eps.taiwantrade.com.tw/files/Taiwantrade/GPAtaiwan.doc. Taiwan has also set up a GPA team to provide companies with professional service and customized assistance on sourcing and matching with potential enterprises. To contact the GPA team, e-mail gpa@taitra.org.tw.
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Strategic Hit Time to Test the Waters? |
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 U.S. gross domestic product expanded 3.5% in the last quarter; U.S. unemployment topped 10% in the last month. Do the positive signs merely reflect such one-offs as cash for clunkers (auto sales accounted for one of the GDP’s three-and-a-half growth-rate percentage points) — or has economic recovery really begun?
Here’s the outlook from PIERS Trade Horizons, the PIERS quarterly report and forecast on containerized trade: The decline in global commerce is decelerating, particularly in exports. Second-quarter statistics, the latest available, show that while exports declined 14.1% in second-quarter ’09 compared with second-quarter '08, the downward momentum is slowing: the previous quarter’s drop was 21.9%.
More, second-quarter export volumes exceeded forecasts by more than 300,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units, the standard measure in containers). Most of the increase is due to improving conditions in Asia, where trade volumes from the U.S. were down just 5.5% — a nearly 15 percentage point improvement over the first quarter’s 20.2% drop.
Strengthening exports to Asia are a sign that U.S. trading partners are building inventories of inputs to ramp up manufacturing. Statistics on commodities bear this out: Cotton and fabrics exports inched up by 0.5%. [See more on cotton exports in More Resources.] Industrial resins posted a 10.9% increase. Miscellaneous plastic, often used in packaging, was up 16.3%.
Clearly, conditions in individual markets — whether defined by geography or trade commodity or industry — vary considerably. Doing its part to boost recovery, PIERS is offering companies a one-time opportunity to use its Trade Profiles product absolutely free to gauge activity in the markets that matter to them.
Trade Profiles provides access to the latest available trade data — down to the details of individual transactions — plus up-to-the-minute background on the parties to each deal. The free search of the Trade Profiles database can be used to look up companies by location, products, or markets. Or identify top buyers’ mainstay suppliers. Or rank sellers by activity, volumes, estimated values.
To obtain logon credentials for your free search of Trade Profiles, Click here — or call +1 800 952 3839, ext. 7175.
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Hot Topic U.S.-China Trade Conflict/Consensus |
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It began with President Obama’s September 11 proclamation that the U.S. would impose added duties on “new pneumatic tires, of rubber, from China, of a kind used on motor cars (except racing cars) and on-the-highway light trucks, vans, and sport utility vehicles.” Two days later, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) announced its launch of antidumping probes into U.S. chicken and auto parts exports. China also filed a formal complaint about the tire tariff with the World Trade Organization.
As U.S. retailers of low-cost tires scrambled to find new sources of supply (fully 17% comes from China), and U.S. chicken farmers and poultry processors faced the abrupt loss of a critical export market in the midst of the recession (China is one of the top three destinations for U.S. broilers), both the U.S. and the Chinese governments insisted they were not engaging in a trade war.
And, indeed, harmony seemed to reign at the October 28-29 Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) in Hangzhou, China, where China announced its intent to reopen its domestic markets to U.S. pork products and live swine (closed because of H1N1 fears). Two-way trade in agricultural, fish, and forest products between the two countries amounts to more than $21 billion a year.
The JCCT has met regularly to talk bilateral trade since 1983. Some other noteworthy policy changes from this 20th session should open opportunities in select Chinese markets for U.S. exporters. For example, China will remove its local content requirements on wind turbines. China’s renewable energy market is expected to reach $100 billion by 2020, and wind energy is the fastest-growing component.
China will require that products made in China by foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) are treated as domestic products under its government procurement rules. While the trading partners established a working group to discuss government procurement policies, China also committed to submit a revised policy conforming to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) early next year. [See the related story in Opportunity Alert.]
In all, 11 agreements were signed at the JCCT, paving the way for more cooperative efforts in agriculture, green energy, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, information security, intellectual property, and travel and tourism.
And then, on November 1, China’s MOC announced an antidumping duty on adipic acid, used to make nylon, from the U.S. and EU, just days before President Obama’s scheduled mid-month visit to China.
Observers agree that neither China nor the U.S. wants a trade war, but both feel the need to renegotiate the terms of a relationship that’s inescapable: China is America’s biggest creditor and on track to retake its position as its biggest supplier of goods. The U.S. is the largest single-country market for China, where exports accounted for 36% of GDP in 2007. The expectation is that the tit for tat of restrictions on discrete categories of trade goods and commodities will continue sporadically as larger issues are worked out.
You can react quickly and effectively with the latest available information on global import-export transactions — whether in tires, chicken parts or adipic acid — from PIERS TI® trade intelligence, the only online source of comprehensive data on waterborne trade in both directions. To learn more, log on to www.piers.com/piersproducts/, or call +1 800 952 3839, ext. 7175.
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Snap Shot Tide Turns East |
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For the first time in decades, the share of total U.S. container volumes handled by West Coast ports failed to reach 50%. After clinging to a 50.5% share in 2007, West Coast ports dipped to 49.3% last year, while East Coast ports climbed to 43.7% from 42.4% and Gulf Coast ports remained flat at 7%.
The result of plunging imports and aggressive expansion at East and Gulf Coast ports, the shift looks likely to become a trend. The expansion of the Panama Canal, on schedule for 2014 completion, will boost direct container shipping from Asia to eastern ports, which are investing in facilities to capture new business. Even in a year of depressed trade, the Port of Jacksonville’s new container facility boosted annual traffic in Asian imports by 306% and exports by 561.9% (year ending June 2009).
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Source: PIERS Global Intelligence Solutions
Correction: The Snap Shot in PIERS Intelligence@Work, Volume 7, No. 2, reporting that the U.S. recession seems to have hit China’s exports of furniture harder than other top country sources, while accurate, was accompanied by an incorrectly labeled chart. Click here to see the correct chart.
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