Spanish merchandise exports have reached their all-time high and increased by 4.7% year-on-year in the first half of 2023, reaching 199,9 billion euro.
Imports, for their part, have fallen by 2.9%, to 216,3 billion euro. As a result, the trade deficit for the first six months of the year has been reduced by almost half (48.6%), to 16,4 billion euro, from the deficit of 31,9 billion registered in the same period of 2022.
The coverage rate -quotient between exports and imports- increased to 92.4% (85.7% in January-June 2022, provisional data).
This is shown in the latest Monthly Report on Foreign Trade of the Secretary of State for Trade with data on declared trade from Customs.
For the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Héctor Gómez, “these data show that the foreign sector is one of the engines of our economy and that the competitiveness of Spanish companies in international markets emphasizes quality and constant innovation”.
Regarding imports, the sectors that contributed positively to the interannual variation rate in the first semester were: automotive sector (contribution of 2.4 points), capital goods (contribution of 2.0 points), food, beverages and tobacco (contribution of 1.2 points) and other merchandise (contribution of 0.1 points).
Exports to the European Union (63.3% of the total) rose 6.3% year-on-year in the first six months of the year. Sales to the euro zone (55.4% of the total) rose by 5.6% and those destined for the rest of the European Union (7.9% of the total) grew by 11.5%. Sales to third destinations (36.7% of the total) increased by 2.1% in this period, with increases in exports to Latin America (21.2%) and Oceania (17.7%) and decreases to Africa ( -7.6%), the Middle East (-6.4%), Asia excluding the Middle East (-2.4%), and North America (-0.6%).
The autonomous communities with the highest growth in their exports were Castilla y León (16.3%), Catalonia (14.5%) and La Rioja (12.6%).
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