The Research On The Comparison Of The International Trade Settlements' Risk Prevention

International trade is a very high risk fields, there is risk in every section of the business. At present many specialized foreign trade companies in our country appear to have less business volume and get less profit, some even have a big deficit. Those companies were in the leading position of the line in the past, but with the reform and open policy, they have difficulty in competing with other firms. After entering into the WTO, the Chinese government will open foreign trade managing power so that more and more enterprises will engage in international trade. Therefore, due to the aggravation of competition, many people are looking for the cause and trying to find solutions for international trade risk precaution.With the coming of knowledge economy, international trade environment and means are changing rapidly. The whole world is becoming an integrated global market. The international market appears to be the buyers' market. Many exporters take advantage of flexible payment terms besides traditional competitive means of quality and price. Thus, how to select safe international trade settling terms becomes one of the important problems enterprises need to care about. In the past, we learn in the school that letter of credit (L/C) was the safest payment terms. In fact, it's not totally true. Western countries now almost give up using L/C in order to strengthen their competitive ability. The portion of their open account (O/A ) business is as high as 90%, but sleeping account rate is controlled to 0.5%, equal to 1/10 of that in the foreign trade enterprises in our country.The selection of payment terms will directly affect safety of getting payment. Therefore, this dissertation mainly discusses how to avoid new behind payment and how to be on guard of trade risks, which is also the urgent task confronting to our exporting enterprises. This dissertation mainly studies risks and precautions of international settlements. It divides international settlements into two categories, one is foreign exchange risk, and another is payment terms risk, which will be discussed respectively.This article explains at some length the risk that foreign exchange fluctuation brings to international settlement, compares several kinds of risk precaution measures and expound and prove how to avoid foreign exchange risk through forward transaction and its application in China.The emphasis of this article is payment terms risk and its management measures. It compares several kinds of payment terms, i.e. remittance, collect and letter of credit, through case analysis to prove L/C is not the only safe terms so long as suitable terms are adopted.Risk is objective, but risk is avoidable. The aim of this dissertation is to give our foreign trade companies some good suggestive measures dealing with international settlement. Therefore, in its last part some risk precaution measures under non-L/C terms and measures, such as export credit insurance and factoring, popular in western countries are introduced. I believed that these two methods will be popularized in China soon to ensure to get safe payment through O/A and collection terms.