As the just-concluded 2025 China Development Forum reiterated China's economic resilience and commitment to multilateral cooperation, a participating top manager from A.P. Moller-Maersk, a global shipping giant, shared his positive anticipations to China's consumption growth, citing its boosting power for the Chinese economy.
The 2025 China Development Forum, taking place from March 23 to 24 in Beijing, was a major international conference on Chinese economy and global investment. Among all the attendees, Jens Eskelund, North Asia Chief Representative of A.P. Moller-Maersk, expressed his confidence towards China's domestic consumption and spoke highly of the government's stimulative policies during an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN).
"I think in general, for a great many of the foreign companies here today, was to hear the emphasis of ongoing consumption again, and making sure that this great engine of the Chinese economy is really beginning to power on, the same way that we saw before. We think that it is one of the things that really needs to happen, because we can see not just in trade, but also in terms of the performance of companies on the ground in China that they are impacted by what has been comparatively low consumption. So if China manages to stimulate demand and really get consumption growing, that will definitely be good news for, I think, not just the foreign, but to an equal extent, also the domestic Chinese business community," said Eskelund.
Talking about the trend of global economic development and wide setbacks against economic globalization, Eskelund noted that the vigorous global goods transport over the past year has proved a positive growth.
"When we look back at 2024, we saw fairly strong growth in trade. When we look at container transport, which I think is a good proxy for manufactured goods, trade grew in volume terms by almost seven percent. And when you look at it, seven percent, I think, is more than twice as fast as global economic growth. So, when you look at the numbers itself, we don't see anything that indicates deglobalization. On the contrary, trade growth has actually been fairly strong," said Eskelund.
Despite current global uncertainty, Eskelund holds positive expectations toward global trade volume in 2025, as well as the capability of all governments to get together and find a way out of worldwide economic turbulence.
"We expect something similar this year, around four percent. But of course, that is a little bit of an unknown number, that is to what extent and how big potential service would be, in that matter of course, come to shave a little bit of these trade numbers. But as things stand right now, our expectation is actually that again this year we're going to see trade in volume terms growing a little bit faster than global economic growth. As far as we're concerned, globalization is here to stay. We hope that some of these sources of tension that we see will be resolved, that the governments find a way to talk about some of these imbalances that we see in global trade presently so that we can all continue to benefit from these benefits that globalization might bring to people," said Eskelund.
Top manager from world shipping giant expresses confidence in China's consumption growth
