Abstract: The digital economy creates new opportunities for the high-quality development of China's exports. Accelerating the development of digital trade and fully leveraging the technological advantages of digital products are important ways to promote the upgrading of the quality of exported products by enterprises. Multi product enterprises are the main form of China's foreign trade enterprises, occupying a dominant position in export activities. Using the micro matching data from the China Customs Database, China Patent Database, and China Industrial Enterprise Database from 2000 to 2014, this study examines the impact of digital product imports on the quality of exported products from multi product enterprises and its underlying mechanisms. The findings show that the import of digital products can generate significant product quality upgrading effects, prompting enterprises to improve the quality of their exported products. The mechanism analysis reveals that the“cost saving effect”, the“digital technology spillover effect”, the“product conversion effect”, and the“intermediate goods import selection effect”caused by the import of digital products are the main mechanism paths for enterprises to improve the quality of their exported products. The heterogeneity results show that the higher the knowledge endowment of enterprises, the more obvious the product differentiation, and the higher the development level of export destination countries, the more significant the quality upgrading effect brought by imported digital products. Further analysis shows that the entry of new products, the exit of old products, the improvement of the existing product quality, and the internal resource reallocation all have an impact on the export product quality of multi product enterprises. Focusing on the dynamic discovery of the existing product quality, it can be seen that the import of digital products can improve the export product quality of non core products, bridge the quality gap between products of different natures, and drive the overall improvement of product quality. Based on the above conclusions, it is necessary to actively guide enterprises to import digital products, fully leverage the role of digital products in product quality and upgrading export trade models, and promote China's high-level opening-up to the outside world.

Key words: import of digital products, quality of export products, cost saving, digital technology, resource allocation