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SHANGHAI : China's most important toy manufacturing base has seen exports soar ahead of the Christmas retail season despite a spate of safety-related recalls this year, state media reported on Wednesday.
The value of toys exported from the southern business hub of Guangdong province jumped 27.6 percent in October after slipping 5.4 percent in the previous month, the official Xinhua agency reported, citing local customs data.
The increase was spurred by strong demand for the holiday season, indicating that the litany of recalls over China-made toys have had a limited impact, the report said.
Hundreds of toy factories in Guangdong had their licences revoked in October after a safety sweep aimed at rejuvenating the damaged "Made-in-China" label turned up thousands of quality problems.
Over the past few months China has come under strong international pressure after millions of toys exported to the United States and Europe proved to have dangerous defects.
China is the world's top toy exporter, selling 22 billion toys overseas last year, or 60 percent of the globe's total.
But the toy industry was only one of a range of sectors that came under the spotlight amid international safety recalls ranging from toothpaste and seafood to tyres and candy.
In one of the highest-profile cases, US toy giant Mattel recalled 18 million toys in August, amid concern the toys had been made with toxic lead paints and magnets that posed a choking risk to children.
Mattel later apologised, saying the vast majority of those recalls were due to its own design flaws, rather than because of problems with manufacturers.
Nevertheless, the recalls of Chinese-made toys have continued in the United States, with US authorities earlier this month recalling 440,000 action figures, including 43,000 sets of plastic teeth used in Halloween costumes.
In the first 10 months, Guangdong exported US$4.94 billion of toys, up 22.9 percent over the same period last year, of which 79 percent went to the United States and the European Union.
Guangdong is widely known as China's toy export base. According to the latest industry figures, the province exported US$11.9 billion worth of toys in 2005. - AFP/de
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