The USA becomes Switzerland’s top export market in 2021

Foreign trade between Switzerland and the USA is booming. Exports have tripled in the last twenty years, reaching their current peak of CHF 47 billion in 2021. At the same time, the USA has displaced Germany as the most important export market for the first time in 70 years.

From 2001 to 2021, trade in goods with the USA went “through the roof”. Despite the financial crisis of 2008/09 and the COVID 19 crisis, exports grew by an average of 6.3 percent per year, reaching a record level of CHF 47 billion in 2021. They were thus three times more dynamic than exports to our second and third most important trading partners, Germany (+2.1 percent) and Italy (+2.0 percent).

Leo Isolani: “In Switzerland, we do give importance to work”

La Statua della Libertà è un simbolo di New York e degli interi Stati Uniti d'America — The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of New York and the entire United States of America.

Exports to the USA: three quarters of growth attributable to pharmaceutical products

Between 2001 and 2021, chemical-pharmaceutical products largely dominated the scene. Exports of these products rose from CHF 4.3 billion to CHF 30.1 billion, doubling their share of total exports to the US to 64 percent. On average, exports to the US showed annual growth of 10 percent – twice as much as to the rest of the world.While shipments of machinery and electronics remained virtually unchanged in value terms, their share fell from 28 to 8 percent. Meanwhile, exports of precision instruments developed similarly to the average (+5.9 percent). Here too, exports to the USA grew twice as strongly as those to the other countries.Food, beverages and tobacco showed the strongest annual growth (+11.5 percent), although they only account for a marginal share. However, this was two and a half times higher in 2021 than twenty years earlier. Watch exports doubled to 3.1 billion Swiss francs, but their share halved over the same period.

Les Etats-Unis deviennent le premier marché d’exportation helvétique en 2021 (French)

Die USA steigen 2021 zum wichtigsten Exportmarkt der Schweiz auf (German)