BEIJING — China's service trade rose by 7.3 percent year-on-year to nearly 2.81 trillion yuan (about $435.02 billion) in the first seven months of the year, the Ministry of Commerce said on Sept 2.

Of the total, service exports reached about 1.34 trillion yuan, up by 23.2 percent year-on-year, and service imports stood at 1.47 trillion yuan, down by 4 percent from a year earlier.

In July alone, the country's service trade reached 431.92 billion yuan, up by 10.1 percent, year-on-year.

Trade in knowledge-intensive services rose in the January-July period to reach nearly 1.29 trillion yuan, up 11.8 percent year-on-year. The figure accounted for 45.8 percent of the total service trade.

Knowledge-intensive service exports increased 15.4 percent to 704.47 billion yuan, accounting for more than half of total service exports, while knowledge-intensive service imports rose 7.6 percent to 582.35 billion yuan.

Trade in travel services in the first seven months declined 32.7 percent to 429.98 billion yuan as countries around the world continued to take strict measures to restrict people's cross-border movement.

China has taken a slew of measures to widen the opening-up of the service industry and pledged to make more efforts to promote the opening-up of trade in services to a higher level.