This year’s National Foreign Exchange Work Conference set the tone: support the development of simple and easy-to-use exchange rate hedging products and reduce the hedging costs of small, medium and micro enterprises.
Subsequently, a series of policies such as fiscal and tax burden reduction, credit expansion, credit insurance, and settlement facilitation were implemented intensively.
What is the effect?
Companies of different sizes and players in different industries have completely different experiences. The following is a breakdown of the real impact of this “policy package” from three dimensions.
Small, medium and micro enterprises: From “dare not lock foreign exchange” to “zero burden hedging”
For small, medium and micro foreign trade enterprises, the most intuitive change in the policy is that the cost of hedging has been reduced to an affordable range.
In the past, the dilemma of “locking up foreign exchange for fear of occupying funds, and not locking up money for fear of losing profits” is being solved by combined services.
Jiaxing Woxin Trading adopts the “Import Financing + Exchange Rate Hedging” plan, which is free of deposits and guarantee fees. The locked forward exchange rate is nearly 3,000 basis points cheaper than the market price, saving about 36,000 yuan in exchange costs for a single transaction.
Weifang Rural Commercial Bank System has reduced or reduced deposits by more than 15 million yuan in total since 2026, pushing the local hedging rate to 41.36%, an increase of 12.9 percentage points from the beginning of the year.
Quanzhou’s “fiscal + financial + foreign exchange” package policy has phased in a fee reduction of 150 million yuan for enterprises. The hedging ratio of private enterprises has increased to 25.4%, and the scale of contract signing has increased 1.4 times year-on-year.
At the data level, the foreign exchange hedging rate of national enterprises reached 33.6%, an increase of 3.7 percentage points from 2025; the hedging rate of Shandong’s entire jurisdiction reached 38.3%, an increase of 8.3 percentage points.
Not only has the risk aversion threshold for small, medium and micro enterprises been lowered, but the capital turnover speed has also been greatly improved due to settlement facilitation – the Quanzhou pilot has achieved “application in seconds, processing in minutes”, and the capital turnover speed of enterprises has been at least doubled.
Large listed companies: Hedging or not, profits are all over the world
Unlike small, medium and micro enterprises, which generally benefit, the profit performance of large companies is seriously divided – the key variable is whether they actively engage in exchange rate hedging.
The profits of unhedged companies are under pressure: BYD incurred large exchange losses due to the appreciation of the RMB in the first quarter of 2026, financial expenses increased by 4.01 billion yuan year-on-year, and net profit attributable to the parent company decreased by 55.4% year-on-year; Linglong Tire’s pre-tax exchange loss in the first quarter reached 267 million yuan, and net profit attributable to the parent company plummeted 95.04% year-on-year.
Hedging companies realize profits: Zhiou Technology will achieve exchange gains of 58.831 million yuan in 2025 through continued foreign exchange hedging transactions, and financial expenses will decrease by 112.9% year-on-year; Aerospace Rainbow has established a normalized exchange rate risk management mechanism to smooth performance impacts through moderate hedging.
Research by Zhang Yu of Huachuang Securities revealed the macro level: In the second half of 2025, the scale of exchange losses of all A-share non-financial listed companies reached 5.2% of the net profits attributable to shareholders in the same period, and its marginal increment was almost equal to the current net profit decline.
Whether hedging or not is no longer the difference between “earn more and less”, but the watershed between “profit or loss”.
Looking at different industries: cross-border e-commerce, processing trade, and traditional manufacturing each have their own place
The policy is not one-size-fits-all, but is targeted at precise policies for different business formats, and the industry benefits are also focused on each.
Cross-border e-commerce: tax incentives and settlement facilitation are two-pronged.
In 2026, with the implementation of the policy of exempting exported goods from import duties and value-added tax, coupled with Tianjin’s pilot program to expand the scope of net trade balance settlement, the settlement costs of small, medium and micro enterprises will be reduced by 30%, and the settlement efficiency of high-quality enterprises will be increased by more than 50%.
Processing trade: Industrial chain integration and innovation are the key words.
The new customs policy breaks the “original import and export” restrictions on bonded repair products and allows repair products to be directly converted into production materials and parts. The comprehensive cost of enterprises is reduced by 30%, and the logistics timeliness is shortened by 50%.
In the first five months of 2026, processing trade imports and exports increased by 22.9% year-on-year, and the proportion of high-tech products increased to 45%.
Traditional manufacturing exports: exchange rate hedging and credit support are the core.
Tai’an Linge Home Furnishing has increased its revenue by RMB 144,300 through three forward exchange settlement contracts; Jinjiang Mingzhi Group adopts the “partial foreign exchange lock + rolling hedging” strategy, and the exchange rate risk coverage rate has increased to 85%; China Construction Bank Huizhou Branch has launched the country’s first offline lithium carbonate hedging business to help companies lock in prices in advance.
Comprehensive judgment: The policy is effective, but structural differentiation is far from eliminated
Policy empowerment has significantly improved the risk resistance and profitability stability of foreign trade companies as a whole – hedging rates have generally increased, hedging costs have decreased, settlement efficiency has improved, and credit availability has increased.
However, three structural contradictions are still prominent:
Cognitive fault: Some small and micro enterprises are limited by manpower and energy, and still believe that hedging will increase additional costs, and there are misunderstandings such as “do not understand, dare not, and are unwilling”.
Uneven product supply: There are insufficient hedging tools for small currencies, and it is difficult for companies in counties and remote areas to obtain professional foreign exchange services.
Psychological barriers to hedging decisions: Large and medium-sized enterprises are worried that “the exchange rate trend will be better than the agreed price after locking the exchange rate”, and unilateral game psychology often occurs.
It can be said that policies have put “tools” and “infrastructure” in front of enterprises, but whether they can be truly used and used well depends on the cognitive upgrade of enterprises and the sinking of the last mile services of financial institutions.
This policy empowerment is more like equipping foreign trade companies with “safety helmets” and “safety belts”, but whether and how to fasten them tightly still requires joint answers from companies and the market.
