CROSS-BORDER e-commerce trade has been flourishing in China, with turnover rising 80.6 percent from a year earlier to 90.24 billion yuan (US$14.33 billion) last year.

The average annual growth rate for the past three years is more than 50 percent, said Yu Guangzhou, head of China’s General Administration of Customs (GAC), at the first Global Cross-Border E-commerce Conference in Beijing on Friday.

China’s e-commerce exports surged 41.3 percent to 33.65 billion yuan last year, while imports rocketed by 116.4 percent to 56.59 billion yuan.

Chinese customs handled 660 million manifests for e-commerce trade in the past year, 8.4 times as much as for conventional imports and exports, according to Yu.

On Nov. 11, the Singles’ Day online shopping festival, Chinese customs processed a total of 16.2 million orders, about 187 per second.

Yu said that China’s customs authority would continue to boost cross-border e-commerce and improve services to meet Chinese demand to buy foreign goods online.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that 220 countries and regions across the world were covered by China’s cross-border e-commerce network as of 2016. (Xinhua)