The State Council Information Office held a press conference on April 14 to introduce the import and export situation in the first quarter of 2026.
Lu Daliang, spokesperson of the General Administration of Customs and director of the Statistics and Analysis Department, introduced a series of important information at the meeting.
my country’s cross-border e-commerce statistical survey is conducted every six months, with official data released in May and October.
Preliminary estimates show that in the first quarter of this year, my country’s cross-border e-commerce imports and exports totaled 618.46 billion yuan, including 473.55 billion yuan in exports and 144.91 billion yuan in imports.
This data fully demonstrates the important position and strong development momentum of my country’s cross-border e-commerce in international trade.
Lu Daliang said that this year’s “Government Work Report” has made arrangements to promote the standardized and orderly development of cross-border e-commerce, and the customs has carefully implemented it and has mainly done three aspects of work.
First, based on the previous pilot, since April 1 this year, the cross-customs area return model for cross-border e-commerce retail exports has been fully promoted in customs across the country.
Under this business model, cross-border e-commerce companies can flexibly choose any port across the country to handle the return and entry procedures when their retail export goods are returned overseas.
This initiative effectively solves the industry pain point of difficult returns, allows cross-border e-commerce companies to be more calm when facing overseas returns, and greatly improves the company’s operational efficiency and market competitiveness.
In the past, the cross-border e-commerce return process was cumbersome and companies often faced many difficulties. However, the current cross-customs return model provides companies with more convenience and choices.
The second is to innovate and support the “TIR + cross-border e-commerce” logistics model. TIR is the Convention on International Road Transport.
Goods transported by TIR do not need to be repeatedly inspected or changed vehicles and reloaded throughout the entire process in the contracting country, which can significantly reduce transportation time and logistics costs.
This allows good e-commerce products to enter thousands of households at home and abroad more conveniently, which not only increases the circulation speed of goods, but also reduces the operating costs of enterprises, further promoting the development of cross-border e-commerce.
This innovative logistics model provides new solutions for cross-border e-commerce logistics and distribution, helping to improve the efficiency and service quality of the entire industry.
The third is to strengthen the collaborative governance between customs and cross-border e-commerce companies. my country and e-commerce platforms jointly create a “pre-supervision warehouse” to pre-position customs supervision into the production operations of enterprises.
This can not only achieve effective supervision, but also greatly reduce the customs clearance time and logistics costs of cross-border e-commerce companies, achieving both improvement in supervision effectiveness and logistics efficiency.
Through this collaborative and co-governance approach, the customs can better understand the production and operation of enterprises, discover and solve problems in a timely manner, and at the same time provide enterprises with more convenient customs clearance services and promote the healthy development of the cross-border e-commerce industry.
To sum up, these measures taken by the General Administration of Customs will effectively promote the standardized and orderly development of my country’s cross-border e-commerce and inject new impetus into the stable growth of my country’s foreign trade.
