In 2020 and 2021, when the coronavirus pandemic forced much of the world’s population to spend more time at home, Chinese exports of laptops recorded double-digit percentage growth.
The boom was one example of how China’s economy benefited from shifting global demand as governments around the world imposed Covid-19 restrictions, crippling spending on restaurants, travel and other services and encouraging purchases of goods.
But this year, China’s shipments of laptops have slumped 16 percent year on year, reflecting a trend of weakening growth in its exports, which may now even be on course to decline.
Amid the easing of Covid measures around the world and supply chain disruption from domestic lockdowns, Chinese exports grew just 3-9 percent in April in dollar terms. It was their weakest level since July 2020.
The trend is part of a sweeping reversal of fortunes for China’s wider economy, which bounced back from the initial shock of the pandemic to outperform the rest of the world in 2020 but is now grappling with the lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities and a property sector crisis.
China has set a 5-5 percent target for GDP expansion this year, the lowest in three decades, but Premier Li Keqiang told officials last week it could struggle to achieve positive growth at all in the current quarter.
“Given the big shock the economy’s just been through plus the headwinds on the export side, I think it’s quite challenging just to get positive growth at all this year,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, China economist at Capital Economics who expects “quite a significant outright decline in export volumes”.
Evans-Pritchard estimated that exports accounted for almost half of China’s 18.3 percent year-on-year gross domestic product expansion in the first quarter of 2021, but expected it to make a negative contribution to growth from the third quarter of this year onwards.