Nigeria-China Trade Exceeded N3trn In 2014

Trade between Nigeria and China in 2014 was already in the excess of $16 billion with January and November taking into account, China’s Deputy Chief of Mission to Nigeria, Zhang Bin, said yesterday.
“In 2013, the trade volume between Nigeria and China was 13.5 billion dollars and then according to our statistics, from January to November 2014, the trade volume already amounted to 16.47 billion dollars”, Zhang told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday.
Zhang said the fact that the trade volume of 11 months exceeded that of the whole of the previous year by 35 percent showed the budding business relationship between the giants of their respective continents.
China is Africa’s largest trading partner and the third line in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. But even as China’s investment drive slows down in the continent, Zhang said both countries were still exploring avenues to bolster further economic cooperation.
He also added that the Asian giant is committed to redressing the trade imbalance by increasing imports from Nigeria. “We do have this problem of trade imbalance and the Chinese side is going all out to solve it,” he enthused. “One of the solutions is that we encourage more Chinese enterprises and companies to import more from Nigeria especially from the agriculture products and also some of the manufactured products.”
The envoy claimed that the joint effort by the countries has already boosted Nigeria’s share in the trade volume with a 93.7 percent increase of China’s import in the first 11 months. He added that the top imports have been agriculture products like cassava, cocoa and palm oil from Nigeria.