CCTV News: On April 14, the State Council Information Office held a regular press conference on economic data in the first quarter.

At the press conference, a reporter asked: What are the highlights and positive changes in my country's foreign trade field since this year?

Wang Lingjun, deputy director of the General Administration of Customs, responded that since this year, with insufficient momentum for world economic growth, intensified trade protectionism and many geopolitical tensions, my country's foreign trade import and export scale has achieved steady growth, and the quality of development has also steadily improved, specifically showing positive changes in these four aspects: First, the activity of business entities has been further enhanced. In the first quarter, my country's enterprises with import and export performance reached 529,000, an increase of 33,000 over the same period last year. Among them, the number of private enterprises hit a record high in the same period, reaching 455,000, accounting for 86.1% of the total number of enterprises with import and export performance in the same period.

The second is to further expand the space for foreign cooperation. In the first quarter, my country's trade with traditional markets remained strongly resilient, and imports and exports to Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and other countries achieved rapid growth. The high-quality joint construction of the "Belt and Road" continues to go deeper and more practical, with the growth rate of imports and exports to the countries jointly constructed by 0.9 percentage points higher than the overall, of which 7.1% will be added to ASEAN and 6.9% will be added to the five Central Asian countries.

The third is to further optimize the regional open layout. The central and western regions of my country continue to leverage their own advantages, undertake industrial transfer in an orderly manner, and further release foreign trade potential. In the first quarter, imports and exports in the central and western regions were 1.84 trillion yuan, an increase of 8.7%, a growth rate of 7.4 percentage points higher than the overall national growth rate, and its proportion of national imports and exports also increased by 1.2 percentage points to 17.9% compared with the same period last year.

Fourth, the "new content" of foreign trade has been further improved. The development of new quality productivity has accelerated, and a number of upstream and downstream enterprises in the equipment industry chain with strong supporting capabilities and excellent product performance have been cultivated, which has promoted China's foreign trade to "new". In the first quarter, the import and export of equipment manufacturing products increased by 7.6%, accounting for half of the foreign trade import and export. New domestic products are being launched continuously, and the export scale of independent brand products has been increasing year by year and the proportion has continued to rise. In the first quarter, the proportion of exports has further increased to 22.8%.