The situation in China looks complicated. The global director of Emerging Markets Research at JP Morgan, Luis Oganes, pointed out that economists continue to reduce growth projections for the Asian country.

"Economists continue to reduce growth projections, we are already a little below 5% for this year. We were used to China growing between 8% and 10%, although that level of growth rates were clearly not sustainable and we probably won't see them for a long time.", he explained during the 2023 Economic Forum, organized by AmCham Peru.

In this context, he remarked that for Latin America -and for the Peruvian economy- the fact of depending so much on exporting commodities to China becomes a source of vulnerability.

“That said, what we have seen is that China's demand for commodities does not appear to be necessarily, at least for now, directly linked to growth. It seems that China is accumulating its inventory of commodities due to so much political and geopolitical uncertainty, etc.he declared.

For Oganes, part of the resilience that is talked about in Latin America, "or that it is not worse than it is", is that the demand for commodities did not fall in line with the slowdown of the Chinese economy. But "We don't know how long this will last, it must have some limit".

Exports to China

The importance of China for Peru is key. In the first six months of the year, Peruvian exports totaled US$30,890 million, according to information from the Association of Exporters (Adex).

Of this amount, shipments to China totaled US$11,336.8 million as of June, an increase of 10.7% compared to the same period of the previous year. That is to say, the Asian country concentrated 36.7% of the total.

“In June, exports to all continents decreased, with the exception of Asia, which increased 13.4%. This positive rate was mainly explained by the higher shipments to China (9.7%), Japan (64.1%), India (42.5%) and the United Arab Emirates (35.3%)”, details a last report from Adex.