China’s General Administration of Customs has achieved a significant global trade boost as the country hit nearly a $1 trillion surplus in the year 2024.

A report by the administration revealed that China exported goods and services worth $3.58 trillion and $2.59 trillion of imports, creating a trade surplus of $990 billion.

This statistic becomes the highest ever recorded, indicating a 21% increase from the previous record of the country’s trade which was at $838 billion in 2022.

According to Zichun Huang, a Chinese economist at Capital Economics, China’s exports look set to remain strong in the coming years, as firms’ frontload shipments as a countermeasure to higher tariff threats from the US, as the President Elect Donald Trump promised sweeping and tough tariffs on Chinese goods.

“Outbound shipments are likely to stay resilient in the near term, supported by further gains in the global market share thanks to a weak real effective exchange rate,” Huang said.

While China ran a deficit in oil and other natural resources due to higher tariffs, its trade surplus in manufactured goods represented 10 percent of the economy. At the same time, China’s imports of factory goods have slowed sharply in the past two years.

Through the Made in China 2025 policy, the Chinese government pledged $ 300 billion to invest and promote advanced manufactured goods. China has now gone from importing cars to becoming the world’s largest car exporter, surpassing Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Germany.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, China now produces about a third of the world’s manufactured goods. That is more than the goods produced by the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Britain combined.

The widening of China’s trade surplus accounted for up to half the entire country’s economic growth last year. Investment in new factories for exports represented much of the rest of the growth, as well as investment in the manufacturing industries in other regions of the world.

As a result, the volume of China’s exports has been rising by more than 12 percent a year. The dollar value of its exports also has been growing at approximately 6%, as prices plunged because Chinese companies were producing even more goods than foreign buyers were ready to purchase.