South Korea is the world’s seventh-largest exporter and the first major exporting economy in the world to report trade figures every month, providing a quick health check on global trade and the economy.
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Exports dropped 18.5% from a year earlier to $36.74 billion in January, following a revised 14.1% fall in December, preliminary data released by the ministry on Monday showed.
The United Nations Comtrade database shows South Korea has the biggest export similarity (59.9 percent) with Japan.
“Korea’s key exports have remained virtually unchanged over the last decade, which indicates a pressing need to reform the industrial structure”, said Kwon Tae-shin of the Korea Economic Research Institute. For the whole year of 2015, exports shrank 7.9 percent compared with the previous year. The unit prices of the exported goods including petrochemical products, semiconductor chips, steel, petroleum-based products and flat panel display devices continued to fall for at least a year due to supply gluts and sharp declines in oil prices. Steel prices retreated to 727 dollars a ton in 2015, down 25.8 percent from 979 dollars in 2014. The reasons include the slowdown of the Chinese economy, low worldwide oil prices and a drop in export unit price attributable to the strong dollar. The exports of ships and offshore plants declined by US$1.4 billion, too.
But imports declined even further by 20.1 percent, resulting in a trade surplus for the 48th month running. Both exports and imports maintained a downward trend for 13 straight months.
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Imports of capital and consumer goods reduced 10 percent and 3.8 percent each in January on a yearly basis on the back of slumping private consumption.
