As a powerful foreign trade city in Guangdong Province, Dongguan's import and export scale held second place in the province last year.

Last year, Dongguan ran a total of 119 China-Europe freight trains, which is of great importance to stabilizing the fundamentals of foreign trade and ensuring the export of enterprises. In the past five years, Dongguan has made great progress in facilitating foreign and outbound investment flows and import and export trade. During the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, Dongguan introduced 40 major projects with foreign investment exceeding 100 million dollars, and the total investment amounted to 4.83 billion dollars. The foreign trade enterprises that came to Dongguan paid great attention to innovation.

Data shows that during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, Dongguan has 2,126 new foreign-funded enterprises' R&D institutions. And the foreign-funded enterprises had 4,471 new authorized domestic invention patents and 6,077 new registered trademarks. These three figures are double that of the "12th Five-Year Plan" period.

The increased awareness of innovation has made Dongguan gradually tear off the label of an "OEM" city. According to the figures, the city's foreign trade dependence has dropped from 165.7% in 2015 to 137.9% in 2020, decreasing 27.8 percentage points. The proportion of general trade in the city's total foreign trade import and export increased from 31.0% to 44.9%, replacing processing trade as the mainstream trade in Dongguan.

In addition, Dongguan has developed "new markets". During the epidemic, the exporters sold goods through live-streaming. In 2021, the import and export volume of cross-border e-commerce in Dongguan totalled 73 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 91.8%. The total amount and growth rate were both the first in the province.