According to the website, Vietnam earned US$3.72 billion from exports and spent US$3.3 billion on imports in January.

Earlier, the Government anticipated that Vietnam would run up a trade deficit of US$300 million while the General Statistics Office forecast that the country’s imports and exports would fall by 45 percent and 24 percent respectively in the first month of 2009.

The US$400 million trade surplus is a good sign for the Southeast Asian economy this year given the impact of the global financial turbulence, says the Website.