Service industry quality in China has seen a steady increase, and the value of service brands has grown steadily, official data released on May 30 by the State Administration for Market Regulation showed.

According to the monitoring data on national service industry quality, in 2017, the added value of service industry accounted for 51.6 percent of the country’s GDP, contributing to 58.8 percent to national economic growth.

It also shows a good momentum in the service trade. In 2017, China’s total service import and export volume reached 4.7 trillion yuan ($733.9 million), a year-on-year increase of 6.8 percent, and export volume reached 1.5 trillion yuan, an increase of 10.6 percent, which was a new high since 2011.

In addition, 2017 customer satisfaction index (percentage system) in the service industry was 74.75, which was 2.86 more than in 2016, and areas such as mobile communications, civil aviation services and online payment received many favorable comments.

The number of complaints from insurance services, financial services, tourism services also decreased greatly.

Data also showed that service trade deficit reached 1.6 trillion yuan, an increase of 0.3 percent over the previous year, and the overall deficit continued to expand.

Imports of emerging services such as information services, intellectual property and personal culture and entertainment also saw great increases.

Meanwhile, compared with 2016, the number of internet service complaints had an increase of 330.86 percent.

With further reform and opening-up, China’s service industry will face more competition, more efforts should be made to strengthen legislation on service industry quality supervision and management, and promote the professionalization, standardization and branding in the traditional service industry, said officials from the State Administration for Market Regulation.