Mo., März 18th 2024
Trade between the two has reached a staggering CHF 300 billion, highlighting a relationship of mutual dependency.
One of the aims of the upcoming negotiations with the EU is to secure Switzerland’s economic access to the EU single market in the long term. In 2022, the two partners traded goods worth around CHF 300 billion. The EU is clearly Switzerland’s most important trading partner, while Switzerland is the EU’s fourth most important trading partner.
The data refer to the year 2022 and are taken from a publication by the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), published in August 2023.
Switzerland traded goods worth CHF 512.46 billion worldwide in 2022, 58.3% of which (CHF 298.77 billion) with EU member states. For its part, the EU traded goods worth a total of 5575.28 billion euros in the same year. Just under 6 percent of this was with the Swiss Confederation.
Switzerland exported goods worth a total of CHF 277.65 billion. Around half of this (CHF 137.71 billion) went to the EU. In terms of value, products from the chemical-pharmaceutical industry (CHF 63.82 billion) were primarily exported to European countries.
This was followed by machinery, apparatus and electronics (CHF 17.52 billion) and precision instruments, watches and jewelry (CHF 17.47 billion).
In 2022, goods worth a total of CHF 234.80 billion were imported into Switzerland. 68.60 percent of these (CHF 161.07 billion) came from EU countries.
These were primarily products from the chemical-pharmaceutical industry (CHF 46.32 billion). All in all, Switzerland imported more from the EU than it exported to it (difference: 23.36 billion Swiss francs).
In 2022, almost 375,000 people commuted to Switzerland from neighbouring countries to work. More than half of them came from France (208,156), followed by Italy (88,573), Germany (64,117) and Austria (8609).
©Keystone/SDA
German 
English 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic