The Ice presented the XXXVI Report on Foreign Trade "Italy in the international economy", according to which the positive trend of foreign sales continues in the first 6 months of 2022. The Made in Italy exports in 2021 had closed with a +7,5% compared to pre-covid levels and a growth of 18,2% compared to 2020. The report highlights a further trend growth in the first half of this year equal to +22,4% over same period of 2021. Furthermore, the report highlights how the increase in foreign sales concerns all sectors, from food and beverages (+18,8% on 2021 and +31,2% on 2019) to the metal sector (+29,2% on 2021 and +44,5% on 2019), passing through chemical products and electrical appliances.
Among the countries that contribute most to the growth of Italian exports, Turkey is the one that records the greatest growth in the first 6 months of 2022, with +38,5% compared to 2021, followed by Belgium, Use e Spain. Only for the Russia, following the war, there was a slowdown of 17,6%.
The effects of the pandemic
The Ice report highlights how "the pandemic has given a further acceleration to some trends that were already underway, including digitization processes, the shift in world demand towards Asia and health and sustainability at the center of the values consumption of the new generations. But it has also put companies in the face of new challenges: the bottlenecks of some distribution chains, the reduced capacity of international logistics and, above all, inflation and the consequent squeeze on the money markets and, above all, today, the difficulties of supply and the price of gas”.
And those from the war in Ukraine
La war in Ukrainemoreover, “is exacerbating inflationary pressures and is generating further tensions in global value chains, particularly for energy-intensive productions. The effects on our country's foreign trade mainly concern imports from Russia and Ukraine, supplier countries of energy raw materials, raw materials and components specific to some supply chains”.
E-commerce on Amazon
Interestingly, last year more than half of SMEs selling on Amazon exported its products, recording sales abroad of around 800 million euros, 25% more than the previous year: of these, more than 60 million were registered outside the EU. According to Annual report, in 2021 more than 200 Italian SMEs selling on Amazon exceeded one million euros in sales for the first time and around 5.000 sales partners exceeded 100 thousand euros. Overall, the over 20.000 businesses sold over 200 products per minute. The 5 most successful product categories abroad were:
- Home and kitchen;
- Beauty;
- Sport and free time;
- Industry and Science;
- Health and personal care.
Retail sales
And, in that regard, they continue to grow retail sales in Italy, up by 1,3% in July and by +4,2% on a year-on-year basis, driven in particular by IT, telecommunications, telephony (+8,2%), and domestic appliances, radio, TV and tape recorders (+6,9%) . According to the Istat data, over the last year the value of retail sales has grown for large-scale distribution (+7,3%) and especially for e-commerce (20,6%), while it has not undergone particular changes for companies operating on small surfaces, and instead decreased for sales outside shops (-1,5%).
