China suffered a severe deficit in audio and video products trade in 2004, disclosed a source from a national forum on export of homemade audio and video products held recently.

Statistics released by the Ministry of Culture show that the average unit price of China's exported audio and video products was merely 3.7 yuan (US$0.45) in 2004, no more than one tenth of the price of the audio and video products produced in Europe and America.

An official with the Ministry of Culture, who participated in the forum, said there were two bottleneck problems for the current audio and video product trade deficit. One was that domestic audio and video producers have been accustomed to excessively reducing prices for winning competition.

Another problem was that the copyright trade accounted for too small a proportion of the country's whole cultural products trade. However, copyright trade took up a large proportion of cultural products trade in Western countries and brought huge economic profits to them.

Liu Yuzhu, director of Culture Market Department under the Ministry of Culture said the Chinese government will vigorously push forward copyright trade in future.

She also disclosed that the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Culture are planning to input 2 million yuan (US$240,000) to boost the country's export of audio and video products. Relevant departments will enact some new regulations on audio and video products exports, in a bid to avoid malignant price competition and rectify audio and video product exports.

(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2005)