Chile's foreign trade up 35 pct in first 5 months of 2021

SANTIAGO, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Chile's foreign trade turnover grew 35 percent year-on-year to 71.04 billion U.S. dollars in the first five months of 2021, marking its best performance in three decades, the government said Monday.

According to the Foreign Affairs Ministry's Undersecretariat of International Economic Relations (Subrei), data from the Central Bank of Chile showed total exports over the period rose 31 percent year-on-year to 37.932 billion dollars.

Copper alone, the South American country's main export product, accounted for 56 percent of the total exports in the period, reaching 21.345 billion dollars, said the Subrei.

Meanwhile, Chile's total imports hit 33.105 billion dollars, up by 39 percent year-on-year, far exceeding pre-pandemic levels, it said.

Imports saw record shipments of mobile phones, meat, medicine, household appliances, computers, televisions, perfumes, trucks and cargo vehicles, among other products, it said.

Rodrigo Yanez, undersecretary of Subrei, said in a statement that Chile seeks to strengthen the role of foreign trade as "one of the fundamental pillars of our economic recovery."

"We are working on an intense agenda of market diversification, promoting the negotiation of new trade agreements and the deepening of treaties we already have in force, facilitating the internationalization of our goods and services, with an emphasis on the digital economy," he added.