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

Statistics released by the Ministry of Culture show that the average unit price of China's exported audio products was merely 3.7 yuan in 2004, no more than one tenth of the price of the audio 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 product trade deficit. One was that domestic audio 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 (240,000 US dollars) to boost the country's export of audio products. Relevant departments will enact some new regulations on audio exports, in a bid to avoid malignant price competition and rectify audio product exports.