According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Vietnam’s export activities from April up to now have been strongly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, after achieving a fairly positive growth in the first quarter of 2020.

In the first 15 days of May, the country exported USD 8.22 billion. This is considered the period with the lowest turnover since the beginning of 2020 until now (excluding the second half of January with the occasion of Tet holiday).

In the import direction, in the first 15 days of May, the turnover was nearly 9.2 billion USD. Thus, the country saw a trade deficit of nearly 1 billion USD in the first period of May.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Covid-19 epidemic, spreading strongly in many countries and regions around the world from mid-March 2020 up to now, has caused disruption to the global trade chain and has a significant impact on activities. import and export activities of Vietnam. After achieving a fairly positive growth in the first quarter of 2020, Vietnam’s trade activities from April up to now have been strongly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The negative effects of the Covid-19 epidemic are expected to have a more pronounced impact on Vietnam’s trade activities in the second quarter of 2020 because from mid-March 2020 up to now, the epidemic has had a very serious impact. to major trading partner markets of Vietnam, including the US, EU and Japan.

Currently, the main trend of Vietnam’s importers to announce is to postpone orders in April and May and temporarily have not negotiated orders from June onwards (normally every year, this time is already is the negotiation time for year-end orders). The main reason is that the importers use the term Force Majeure (Force Majeure) when many countries ask to close cities, even nationwide, people are required to stay at home. For this reason, products such as textiles, footwear, wooden products … are suffering double effects from the Covid-19 epidemic due to the improvement of raw materials since the beginning of March, but now facing difficulties in output markets, especially the EU and the US are the two main export markets of Vietnam.

However, if the disease is controlled in the second quarter of 2020, it is expected that exports will increase again in the second half of the year and continue to be the main growth engine of the Vietnamese economy in 2020 thanks to demand for pepper. consumption in the world increased again, plus the competitive advantages when the EVFTA Agreement officially came into effect.

Although the trade deficit in the first half of May but accumulated from the beginning of the year to May 15, the scale of import and export turnover of the whole country reached nearly 177 billion USD, of which exports were over 89 billion USD. As a result, Vietnam still has a trade surplus of about US $ 1.4 billion.

Credit: Cong Thuong online