São Paulo – The Brazilian trade balance started 2015 with a US$ 3.174 billion deficit. Last month’s data was released this Monday (02nd) by the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade (MDIC) and shows both imports and exports going down.
Brazil exported the amount of US$ 13.704 billion in January, or US$ 652.6 million each business day. By the daily average, exports went down 10.4% in comparison to January 2014. External purchases add up to US$ 16.878 billion and were 12% less than a year ago, also based on the daily average.
External sales dropped in the categories of commodities and manufactured products, but increased among semi-manufactured products.
Within manufactured products, the main reductions were recorded in exports of auto, fuel oils, engines and generators, hydrocarbon, malleable cast iron tubes, ethanol, earthwork machinery, polymers, paper and cardboard, auto parts, auto engines and concentrated orange juice. Among commodities, dropped sales were recorded with iron ore, beef, pork, soybean meal and poultry.
Among the semi-manufactured products, the increases were registered with semi-finished iron and steel, cast iron, timber, crude soybean oil and semi-finished gold.
Among destinations, sales to every region went down, except for the Middle East. The exports to Middle East countries reached US$ 846 million, an 11.9% increase over January last year. In the region, the sales increased, mainly, with corn as grain, refined sugar, iron ore, aluminum oxide and hydroxide, soybean meal, wheat as grain and earthwork machinery.
Lower deficit
The president of the Brazilian Foreign Trade Association (AEB), José Augusto de Castro, said that January’s results have little influence over the year’s performance since this month hasn’t seen yet the first shipments of the new soybean harvest, one of the main exported commodity by the country.
He said that the trade balance performance of January 2015 was better than January 2014, when the balance was negative in US$ 4.068 billion, and noticed that there was an increase in exports and a drop in imports of oil because of the increase in production of the commodity in the country.
“This performance shouldn’t last the whole year, since there are planned stops for platform maintenance in 2015. We hope that at the end of 2015, oil exports will have gone up by 15 to 20%. Brazil expanded its oil exports, but didn’t take advantage of it because the price dropped 45%, which limited profits”, he said. This situation, he said, also happens with the sale of other commodities, which are, on average, set with lower prices.
About the Middle East performance on Brazilian products purchases, Castro notes that exports to the region are small in comparison to the total and, for this, small changes of sales and buys display great oscillation. “Maybe, the general sales growth had something to do with the performance of commodities sales to the region”, he said. Exports to the Middle East amount to 6.1% of the total.
Imports
Among imports, fuel and lubricants purchases went down 28.4%, consumer goods dropped 14.2%, capital goods went down 8% and raw material and intermediates 7%. Brazilian imports from the Middle East also dropped 63.8% because of less purchase of crude oil, fuel oils, aviation kerosene, urea, organic and synthetic fertilizers, aircraft parts and spares and medicines. Brazil bought less from every region, with the exceptions being other countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Castro said that AEB is keeping its estimative finished in December that pointed to a US$ 8.1 billion surplus in 2015, especially because of the drop in imports and non-growth in exports. “With the measures just announced by the government (among them, raise of tax fees over imported products), this trend is clearer”, he said. The sector estimates that the exchange rate should end the year with the dollar at R$ 2.80.
Still according to MDIC, the main suppliers to Brazil in January were: China, United States, Germany, Argentina and South Korea. The main purchasers in the period were United States, China, Argentina, Germany and The Netherlands (Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg).
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
