Small exporters improved their score at the beginning of the year by around thirty million euros

Unlike the first estimate which indicated a decline in exports of 0.6 percent in January, the final processing, which included small export values, showed an increase of 3.6 percent. While exports in January amounted to 770 million euros, the first estimates for February, which do not yet include the smallest exporters, indicate that it was greater than 900 million euros.

When the State Bureau of Statistics included exports valued below the inclusion threshold in the first estimates of export results for January in the final calculation, it turned out that in January exports were not 0.6 percent lower than in the first month of last year, but rather 3.6 percent higher. The difference between the first estimate and the final calculation is only about thirty million euros, but that was enough to turn the negative sign into a positive one. Even more importantly, small exporters, those who do not achieve more than 900 thousand kuna in annual exports, which is the value of the inclusion threshold for this year, are responsible for this significant change in sign in January.

While in January exports amounted to 770 million euros, the first estimates for February indicate that, again without including the values achieved by the smallest exporters, exports in the second month of this year exceeded 900 million euros. For now, we have data showing that in the first two months of this year, exports have increased by a total of 2.7 percent compared to the same period last year, but when those below the inclusion threshold are added to the final calculation for February, it will be approximately a four percent increase, which is still significantly below the growth achieved last year and the year before, when it was over ten percent.

Zvonimir Savić, director of the HGK Sector for Financial Institutions, Business Information, and Economic Analysis, expects that the pace of export growth will continue this year, but that it will be slower than last year.

– According to the first results, commodity exports in February clearly grew a little faster than imports, unlike in January, which is why the growth of the foreign trade deficit in the first two months was slightly smaller. We expect that the trends in foreign trade exchange will remain similar throughout the year, which largely depends on demand in foreign and domestic markets, but also on many other factors – comments Savić.

After a long time, a small turnaround in trends appeared among the data on the first results of foreign trade exchange for the first two months – exports increased more to markets outside the European Union than within it.

According to what can be seen from the export data for the first month of this year, it seems that the increase in exports to the USA, the only market outside the EU that has significantly grown, contributed to this. Exports to the USA in January amounted to 31 million euros and were 62 percent higher than in the first month of last year.