China's Exports Hit Hard

The current climate is growing more difficult than the 2008 crisis. Profits slipped 5.4% year on year for July. China's export hub hit hard by global economic slowdown

In the first seven months of this year, profits for industrial firms fell 2.7 per cent from the same period last year to 2.68 trillion yuan. It is 0.5 percentage points more than the decrease for the first six months.

In the first seven months, state-owned and state- controlled industrial enterprises saw their profits fall 12.2 per cent from a year earlier to 784.7 billion yuan, (about $124 billion).

This is interesting. Non-state owned industrial, because of its long-term uncertain access to capital and influence, could be presumed to be operating more leanly.

But it has witnessed a rise in bankruptcies that is even "more serious" than the 2008-09 financial crisis, said Zhou Dewen, Chairman of the Wenzhou SME Development Association.

"We have about 3,000 members and more than 10 per cent have closed down and about 20 per cent are struggling," Zhou said.

These are SMEs. Larger companies are better able to adapt, based on the stats below:

According to a report released by the financial and economic committee of Zhejiang Provincial People's Congress, 140 out of 3,998 large enterprises in Wenzhou closed in the first half of the year while 57 percent of those large companies cut production.

Meanwhile Rate Swaps again hit a three month high. Reuters article. Those capitalists (just like in the rest of the world) just hanging on the government's every currency and liquidity move.