Against the backdrop of the digital economy, digital new-quality productivity has evolved into a core new driver propelling the transformation and upgrading of Zhanjiang’s foreign trade exports. Adopting a regional analytical lens, this paper compiles Zhanjiang’s foreign trade data from 2010 to 2024, constructs a multi-dimensional comprehensive evaluation index system for digital new-quality productivity, and empirically investigates its impact on the transformation and upgrading of foreign trade exports using a multiple linear regression model. The results reveal that digital new-quality productivity exerts a significant positive effect on advancing the transformation and upgrading of Zhanjiang’s foreign trade exports; however, its internal driving mechanism exhibits structural imbalance, marked by the characteristics of "infrastructure leading, innovation lagging, industrial integration pending, and green potential in reserve". Concurrently, latent risks such as misallocation of innovation resources and excessive administrative intervention are discerned. In light of these findings, Zhanjiang should consolidate its digital infrastructure advantages while enhancing inter-departmental synergy, address the bottlenecks in digital innovation, deepen integration between digital technology and industries, establish a green trade system, refine government functions, and facilitate the transition of the digital new-quality productivity-driven model toward "hardware-software synergy", thereby accelerating the high-quality transformation and upgrading of its foreign trade.