2015年CRI China to Increase Investment in Africa（在线收听）

China to Increase Investment in Africa

Vice Commerce Minister Qian Keming says future cooperation will focus more on strengthening infrastructure construction in Africa and helping the continent to realize industrialization and agricultural modernization. 

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Qian says China and Africa have mutually benefited from their cooperation.

"China has been Africa's largest trading partner for the past six-consecutive-years. The trade volume between the two reached 220 billion U.S dollars in 2014, 20 times higher than the figure when the Forum was established. Africa is an emerging destination for investment from Chinese enterprises. The stock of direct investment from China to Africa has reached 32.4 billion US dollars, growing by over 30% yearly in the past 15 years."

Despite the robust figures, trade between China and Africa has been under downward pressure since a slowdown in the world economy this year.

Qian points out that this is largely due to the slide in global commodity trading prices.

He notes that China's imports from Africa have largely not been affected by the trend, while China's exports to Africa reached 80.9 billion U.S dollars, representing a 5.8% year on year growth.

Qian said all these figures show that cooperation between China and Africa is looking optimistic but that there are indeed some imbalances in the Sino-African trade structure which need to be adjusted in the future.

"China has trading surplus while Africa has a deficit. Also the trading structure is not diversified enough. Until now, our imports mostly focus on natural resources and some primary agricultural products. So we will try to diversity our imports from Africa. On the other hand, China will expand the investment scale to Africa, and promote further production capacity cooperation."

Qian says China will unveil a package of cooperation proposals at the Johannesburg meeting to help African countries upgrade industrial structure, safeguard food security and build infrastructure.

Also at the summit, Chinese companies will exhibit their expertise in the areas of railway, aviation, electricity, telecom, machinery and smart manufacturing.

For CRI, I am Min Rui.