Credit Management March 2024

International Trade
Monthly round-up of the latest stories
in global trade by Andrea Kirkby.
AN EU TOY STORY
The Chinese way
THE Economist recently commented on
how Chinese president Xi Jinping and
the Chinese Communist Party take a very
serious world view of the importance of
robots. In 2023, half of all industrial robot
installations were apparently in China
with the country producing more than six
million ‘service robots’ to, for example,
cook, clean, and move boxes. This, says
the publication, is part of a deliberate
push to increase productivity, noting that
robots don’t get Covid.
The story becomes more interesting
when it’s considered that the working-age
population in China is projected to drop
by more than 20 percent by 2050; there
are already labour shortages of which
41 percent are in manufacturing-related
positions. But many of the problems
that factories are facing apply equally
to agriculture as well and since China
is “paranoid about food security and
uninterested in immigration”, automation
could be the solution here, too.
There is also a shortage of care workers
for 8.1m care-home residents and a
recent state plan includes ‘smart elderly
care’ from robots to help with movement
or even just offer companionship.
The Government wants the robotics
industry to become more self-sufficient;
in 2023, 36 percent of the industrial
robots China installed were made
domestically – up from 25 percent in
2013.
But the story is bigger than it appears.
For exporters to compete with China, they
too will have to automate. Robots require
investment, but they don’t go on strike,
don’t demand pay rises and as noted
earlier, don’t fall sick. That gives Chinese
manufacturers an advantage.
In good spirits
DEPARTMENT for Business and Trade, in
an end of 2023 press release, said that UK
food and drink exporters saw great success
in the run up to Christmas as demand from
consumers in CPTPP, the trade bloc in the
Indo-Pacific that the UK signed up to in July
2023, ‘boomed’.
The department’s data shows that
luxury British Scotch whisky, chocolate and
sparkling wine were ordered en masse
by CPTPP countries including Singapore,
Japan, Mexico and Malaysia. In particular, in
2023, UK chocolate exports to Singapore
increased by 220 percent to over £26m
while UK sparkling wine exports to Japan
ACCORDING to the Evening Standard,
UK parliamentarians sitting on the
European Scrutiny Committee have
raised concerns about proposed new
rules from Europe that could soon
require UK toys sold on the continent to
come with such an electronic certificate.
The changes, proposed by the
European Commission, would amend
EU rules governing toy safety. They
would demand safety information on
the toy, updating the current paperbased
requirements.
Regulations currently ban toys
containing carcinogenic, mutagenic
or reprotoxic chemicals (CMRs). Rules
would be extended to cover further
classes of harmful chemicals, including
endocrine disruptors, which interfere
with the body’s hormones, and
respiratory sensitisers, which produce
an irreversible allergic reaction. Any UK
toy producer placing goods on the EU
market would need to follow the new
rules.
It’s interesting that the requirements
for products sold in Great Britain would
not change, but the rules would apply
in Northern Ireland under the Windsor
Framework. Notably, the Committee
noted that the UK Government had not
consulted manufacturers in Northern
Ireland on the likely impact of the new
rules.
increased by 140 percent to over £26m.
It’s of note that Scotch whisky dominates
the Singaporean market, with over £380m
worth of the drink exported from the UK
to Singapore in 2023 – an increase of
31 percent (£90m) on the previous year.
Similarly, it rose by 43 percent (£11m) in
Malaysia accross the past year.
The Indo-Pacific region may account for
the majority of global growth and around
half of the world’s middle-class consumers
in future decades. Under CPTPP, which the
UK is set to formally join in the second half
of 2024, tariffs on 99 percent of UK goods
exports will drop to zero.
Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / March 2024 / PAGE 30