As preliminary results released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Friday indicated, the overall foreign trade volume-both imports and exports-increased in April 2026. In terms of physical quantity, German exports increased by 4.8 percent and imports increased by 2.8 percent compared to the same month last year.
The focus on volume measures the sheer quantity of goods traded, irrespective of current price changes, thereby complementing the nominal totals provided by the standard trade statistics, which do account for price fluctuations. For comparison, the nominal figures showed a higher growth rate: exports were up by 3.7 percent and imports by 6.3 percent in April 2026 compared to the previous year.
Looking at the long-term trend since 2019, the dynamics of imports and exports have differed significantly. In the full year 2025, the volume of exports grew for the first time in three years, rising 1.3 percent compared to 2024. However, the actual quantity of goods traded across Germany’s borders remained 6.3 percent lower than in 2019, the final year before the economic crises resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A similar pattern was observed for imports. The import volume recovered for the first time in two years, showing a 1.6 percent increase over 2024, but it was still 4.2 percent below the 2019 level.
The average value of the goods traded, a measure independent of material quantity that reflects average price development, has followed the inverse trend since 2019. Unlike the overall trade volume, average value data can only be methodically compared using 2021 as the base year. The highest average values, both for imports and exports, were recorded in 2022, when the average export value was 17.3 percent and the average import value was 21.2 percent above the 2021 level. Since then, these average values have stabilized. In 2025, they stood at 16.0 percent for exports and 15.8 percent for imports compared to 2021. In 2019, these average export values were 7.7 percent and import values were 9.8 percent below the 2021 base year.
In summary, the collected figures on volume and average value reveal that the quantity of traded goods in 2025 was smaller than at the start of the period in 2019. Concurrently, the average value of those goods in 2025 was higher than in 2019. While the nominal trade figures, which include both quantity and price changes, showed considerable growth-with German exports surpassing the pre-crisis 2019 level by a significant 17.8 percent, and imports increasing nominally by 23.3 percent compared to 2019-the trade volumes, which exclude price changes, remained beneath the levels of the pre-Corona year of 2019, according to the statisticians.
