DHL commissioned research reveals new export landscape for ASEAN and Asia

DHL revealed today the findings of a study commissioned to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on regional trade flows. The report entitled Trading up: A New Export Landscape for ASEAN and Asia, examines the movement of goods across borders in Asia, with ASEAN as the starting point. Findings show that despite goals on ASEAN integration, the new export landscape in Asia reveals that ASEAN is at a cross roads between pursuing deeper integration with fellow ASEAN member countries, or falling away to develop individual bilateral trading relationships with China. The share of exports to China from all ASEAN countries in the study except Vietnam has risen sharply while intra-ASEAN trade has shown a declining growth trend.

The release of the study is timed to coincide with the ASEAN Business and Investment Summit (ASEAN-BIS), which DHL has been a key sponsor for the past 5 years. The study concentrated on the ASEAN bloc’s six largest economies – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – and analyzed the trade of its closest regional competitors, China, Japan and India. Shifting import and export trends from 2000 to 2007 are analyzed, focusing particularly on the role played by high-value exports as compared with lower-value bulk commodity goods. It is follow-up research from “ASEAN Exports: Today, Tomorrow and the High-value Challenge”, which DHL and EIU jointly released at the 4th ASEAN Business and Investment Summit 2006.

This report shows that trading volumes have changed over the past seven years, the composition of trade has shifted and, most importantly, trade flows have realigned to respond to changing economic and business conditions. DHL believes that for ASEAN to sustain growth, governments and businesses alike have to understand how trade patterns and flows are evolving, particularly as new centres of manufacturing such as China and India rise in the global trading system.

While the study highlighted that intra-ASEAN trade has declined compared with the stellar rise of China, DHL believes that the region will stand firm and continue to grow. It strongly advocates that governments and businesses play a part to move the trade bloc up the export value chain by investing in infrastructure and focusing more on the high-value imports and exports category such as consumer electronics, information technology and medical devices.

“DHL has a dominant position as an express delivery provider in ASEAN and these data confirm what many of our customers have been saying anecdotally. The redirection of trade flows to China has played to our strength in that market, but we urge the Governments of ASEAN to redouble their efforts to reduce trade barriers in their own countries. Intra-ASEAN trade still has great potential to provide economic opportunity and raise living standards,” Mr. McHugh noted.