The trade matrix between India and China | Number Theory

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China is the world’s largest exporter. It is also the largest source of imports for India. Beyond these two well known facts, what does the India-China trade matrix look like? Here are the numbers that matter.

This picture shows an aerial view of shipping containers stacked at a port in Qingdao, in eastern China's Shandong province on September 4, 2025. (Photo by AFP) / China OUT)

Are there commodities where India is a key export market for China?

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  Are there commodities where India is a key export market for China?

  India’s share in China’s overall exports is still under 4%. Are there commodities where India is a key market? In 2024, India accounted for more than 13% of China’s silk exports worth around $96 million, up from 6% in 1992. It also absorbed over 13% of China’s organic chemical shipments, valued at about $11 billion, compared with just 2.2% three decades earlier. Its share of Chinese exports rose sharply in tanning and dyeing extracts as well, climbing from less than 1% in 1992 to more than 10% in 2024, while categories such as nickel, glassware, fertilisers and photographic goods also reveal higher Indian demand. However, these are not China’s biggest export interests. Sure, India’s imports of electrical machinery from China reached $42 billion in 2024, yet this accounted for only about 4.6% of China’s global sales of such equipment. Boilers and reactors showed a similar pattern, with $24 billion worth of imports translating into a share of just over 4%. India has become a key buyer in several specialised niches with relatively small global volumes, but continues to play a limited role in China’s mass export industries.
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  How dependent is India on Chinese imports?

  Given the fact that China is India’s largest source of imports, the answer is intuitive, but a granular analysis can throw more light. In 2024, imports of machinery and electronics from China reached $74.6 billion, accounting for just over 52% of India’s total imports in this category. In chemicals, China accounted for nearly 29% of India’s imports ($16.8 billion in 2024). In textiles and clothing, China provided around 39% of India’s total imports. In footwear, it supplied about 42% of India’s imports. India’s import dependence on China becomes more pronounced in certain key sectors at a disaggregated level. Active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and rare earth metals are good examples. APIs and rare earth metals fall across several HS codes, but HS 2941 (antibiotics), HS 2805.30 (rare-earth metals, scandium and yttrium) and HS 2846 (rare-earth compounds) serve as useful indicators. In 2024, China supplied nearly 89% of India’s antibiotic imports. Meanwhile, China’s share in India’s imports of rare earth metals and compounds stood at 73% and 34% respectively. To put these in context vis-à-vis China’s overall exports, India absorbed 26% of China’s antibiotic exports but barely 2% of its rare-earth exports.
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  How dependent is China on Indian imports?

  India’s export basket to China looks very different from its import profile. Minerals are India’s biggest export item to the country—at $3.3 billion in 2024, China accounted for 67% of India’s global exports in the category. Other groups where China is a major buyer include footwear (17%), animal products (10%), and vegetables (7%). Furthermore, chemicals ($1.9 billion), machinery and electronics ($1.9 billion), and metals ($1.1 billion) are sizeable in value, but China’s share in India’s global exports in these sectors is only about 2%-3%. Over time, China’s share in India’s exports increased from under 1% in the early 1990s to a peak of over 7% in 2010, before falling back to 3.4% in 2024. That decline reflects both India’s diversification of markets and the cooling of commodity-driven exports to China. From Beijing’s side, the dependence is minimal. India supplies about 8% of China’s footwear imports and just 2-3% in textiles, animal products, and chemicals. Even in minerals—India’s strongest export to China—the country contributes less than 2% of China’s total imports. These numbers should be the guiding principle for any recalibration of Sino-Indian trade relations.