China suffered a severe deficit in audio and video products
trade in 2004, disclosed a source from a national forum on export
of homemade audio and video products held recently.
Statistics released by the Ministry of Culture show that the
average unit price of China's exported audio and video products was
merely 3.7 yuan (US$0.45) in 2004, no more than one tenth of the
price of the audio and video products produced in Europe and
America.
An official with the Ministry of Culture, who participated in
the forum, said there were two bottleneck problems for the current
audio and video product trade deficit. One was that domestic audio
and video producers have been accustomed to excessively reducing
prices for winning competition.
Another problem was that the copyright trade accounted for too
small a proportion of the country's whole cultural products trade.
However, copyright trade took up a large proportion of cultural
products trade in Western countries and brought huge economic
profits to them.
Liu Yuzhu, director of Culture Market Department under the
Ministry of Culture said the Chinese government will vigorously
push forward copyright trade in future.
She also disclosed that the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry
of Culture are planning to input 2 million yuan (US$240,000) to
boost the country's export of audio and video products. Relevant
departments will enact some new regulations on audio and video
products exports, in a bid to avoid malignant price competition and
rectify audio and video product exports.
(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2005)