China's service trade up 12.7% in Jan-Oct

China's service trade rose 12.7 percent year-on-year to reach 4.2 trillion yuan ($659.41 billion) in the first 10 months of this year, the Ministry of Commerce said Thursday.

Of the total, service exports totalled nearly 2 trillion yuan, up 29 percent year-on-year, and service imports stood at 2.2 trillion yuan, up 1.1 percent year-on-year.

The country logged a marked drop in service trade deficit during the period as the growth of service trade exports outpaced that of imports by 27.9 percentage points.

In the first 10 months, the deficit of service trade stood at 203.17 billion yuan, 424.7 billion yuan less than the same period last year, MOC data showed.

Compared with the same period in 2019, however, service trade dropped 5.4 percent, with service exports up 26.6 percent and service imports down 23.1 percent.

In October alone, the country's service trade registered 413.97 billion yuan, up 24 percent year-on-year.

Trade in knowledge-intensive services rose in the January-October period to reach nearly 1.86 trillion yuan, up 13.3 percent year-on-year. The figure accounted for 44.2 percent of the total service trade.

Knowledge-intensive service exports increased 16.9 percent from a year ago to 1.01 trillion yuan, accounting for more than half of total service exports, while knowledge-intensive service imports rose 9.3 percent to 850.55 billion yuan.

Trade in travel services continued to decline, said the MOC.

In the January-October period, trade in travel services dropped 27.7 percent year-on-year to 631.68 billion yuan as countries around the world continued to take strict measures to restrict people's cross-border movement.

China has taken a slew of measures to widen the opening-up of the service industry and pledged to make more efforts to promote the opening-up of trade in services to a higher level.