China loses top spot among Germany’s trading partners
China lost its position as Germany’s most important trading partner in the first quarter.
Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced the country’s most important trading partners for the first quarter of the year.
Accordingly, since Germany imports significantly fewer goods from China, China ranked second in the list of the most important partner countries in German foreign trade in the period January-March 2024.
Goods trade between Germany and China decreased by 11.7% in the January-March period, falling to 36 billion euros.
The value of goods exported from Germany to China decreased by 1.1 percent to 24 billion euros.
In the quarter in question, total trade between Germany and the USA was 63.2 billion euros, while it remained at 60 billion euros with China. Thus, China lost its position as Germany’s most important trade partner to the USA.
China became Germany’s most important commercial partner for the eighth consecutive time with a volume of 253.1 billion euros in 2023.
China is Germany’s most important supplier of goods
While Germany imported goods worth a total of 331.2 billion euros in the first quarter of the year, China continued to be Germany’s most important supplier of goods with a share of 10.9 percent in all imports.
China was followed by the Netherlands with 7.6 percent and the USA with 7.0 percent.
In the first quarter of 2023, China’s share in Germany’s total imports was 11.4 percent. In the first quarter of 2024, data processing equipment and electrical and optical products worth 11 billion euros (annual decline of 14.2 percent) were imported from China, followed by electrical equipment worth 6.4 billion euros (annual decline of 18 percent) and 2.9 Machines worth billions of euros followed. Additionally, chemical products worth 1.2 billion euros were imported from China.
Despite the decline in the most important imported goods, it was noteworthy that in the first quarter of 2024, many products for daily life, as well as goods for energy conversion, largely came from China.
85.4 percent of photovoltaic systems, 86.3 percent of portable computers, 60.5 percent of smartphones and 45.4 percent of lithium-ion batteries imported to Germany came from China. 25.9 percent of electric cars imported to Germany came from China.
While Germany exported motor vehicles and vehicle parts worth 5.9 billion euros mainly to China in the first quarter of 2024, these exports decreased by 6.8 percent compared to the first quarter of 2023.
Among the most important export goods to China, the second and third places were machinery with 4.8 billion euros, and data processing equipment, electrical and optical products with 3.3 billion euros.
Germany’s foreign trade deficit with China reached 12 billion euros in the first quarter. This deficit was recorded as 16.5 billion euros in the same quarter of 2023.