China-S Korea economic exchange forum held in Seoul

Business executives from China and South Korea expressed their anticipation on Monday for future cooperation between the two countries in renewable energy, cutting-edge technology, supply chain and other fields.

At a forum on enhancing China-South Korea economic exchanges held in Seoul, business leaders and government officials aired their optimism about the prospects of collaboration and looked forward to exploring opportunities for mutual growth and development.

The economic and trade cooperation is the ballast of China-South Korea relations for long, they said.

For the past two decades, China has consistently been South Korea's largest trading partner, while South Korea holds the position of China's third-largest trading partner.

As of March 2024, South Korea had established over 75,000 companies in China, with actual investments exceeding 100 billion U.S. dollars.

Attendees of the meeting from both sides agreed that the achievements in China-South Korea economic and trade cooperation reflect the solid foundation and strong resilience of pragmatic cooperation between the two countries.

"China and South Korea are partners with highly integrated interests and tightly mutually intertwined industrial and supply chains. The trade in intermediate and capital goods between the two countries accounts for 90 percent of the total bilateral trade volume. Enterprises from both countries are expected to explore cooperation potentials in emerging fields such as digital economy, green development, high-end manufacturing, biopharmaceuticals, and artificial intelligence, so as to constantly bring up new growth drivers of cooperation," said Ren Hongbin, chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade while addressing the meeting.

At the forum, representatives of business circles from both countries engaged in in-depth discussions on deepening supply chain cooperation.

Both sides noted that given the current global economic development environment, it is of great importance for the two sides to jointly promote optimization and upgrading of the industrial and supply chains of the two countries.

China-S Korea economic exchange forum held in Seoul

China-S Korea economic exchange forum held in Seoul

The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan road-rail intermodal transport service had handled a total of 100 trains this year as of Friday, marking a regular and expanded operation of the intermodal transport service, according to the China Railway Urumqi Bureau Group Co., Ltd. in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Since the beginning of July, the number of cargo trains arriving in Xinjiang's Kashgar City for further transit has increased to an average of two per day.

"The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan road-rail intermodal transport system capitalizes on Kashgar's favorable location, cutting transit time by around five days compared to other routes and reducing costs by nearly 30 percent," said Fang Zijun, a business manager at Kashgar inland port multimodal transport company.

In March, Kashgar Customs implemented a new clearance model where goods are inspected at the point of origin, allowing them to be proceeded directly to their destination without additional customs checks at the border. This change has reduced customs processing time from three to five days to just six to eight hours, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the multimodal transport service.

In the past five years, Kashgar has handled trains from various regions across China such as south China's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), north China's Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, southwest China's Sichuan Province and east China's Jiangsu Province.

These trains carried over 300 types of goods, ranging from new energy vehicles to machinery components, opening up a new international trade channel that stretches to Central and West Asia, as well as Europe.

China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan road-rail transport system achieves milestone with regular, expanded operations