INE's Friday Foreign-Trade Release Pushes Portugal's Q1 2026 Goods Deficit to €8.7 Billion — A 34% Year-on-Year Widening as a €1.3 Billion Energy Bill, Storm Damage and a 6.5% Export Drop Combine

Portugal's Instituto Nacional de Estatística released the foreign-trade statistics for March 2026 on Friday 8 May, and the cumulative first-quarter picture is the most important data point in the file. The merchandise-trade deficit through the three months to March widened to €8.7 billion, a 34% deterioration against the same window in 2025, with a €1.3 billion fuel-import bill, a 6.5% drop in goods exports and a 3% rise in imports all pulling in the same direction.

March alone turned, but the quarterly arithmetic was already set

The March print itself was a partial recovery from a brutal February. INE recorded year-on-year nominal growth of 10.6% in exports and 11.6% in imports for March 2026, with the monthly trade balance landing at a €2,863 million deficit — €356 million wider than March 2025. Excluding transactions without transfer of ownership (TTE), the deficit was €2,907 million, with exports up 14.6% and imports up 11.9% on the same basis.

That single-month rebound matters, because the prior month was a collapse. February 2026 had recorded year-on-year declines of 14.5% in exports and 4.2% in imports, the residue of a quarter that opened with the January–February storm cycle disrupting domestic logistics, port handling and continental supply chains. March's bounce shows the underlying export base was still functional; what it could not do was unwind the cumulative damage already booked into January and February.

The energy bill is the swing factor

Of the €8.7 billion Q1 deficit, fuel imports alone accounted for €1.3 billion, and that line is what turned a manageable trade gap into a 34% widening. The Middle East escalation that pushed Brent through $100 from late February — and held it there until the Trump-Iran de-escalation finally cracked the price below the threshold on 7 May — fed straight through to the customs print in March. Portugal's energy-import dependence is structural: even with the renewables share of the power mix above 85%, transport and chemical feedstocks remain almost wholly imported.

The other side of the gap is the export contraction. Aggregate goods exports fell 6.5% year-on-year in the quarter, costing about €1.4 billion in lost revenue. The combination of weather-related production disruption in January–February, the polyamide antidumping dispute that ATP raised in Brussels last week, and softer Iberian and German demand all show up in that line. INE's release flagged that March imports were dominated by transport materials and machinery, primarily sourced from Spain and the Netherlands — the same intra-EU corridor that drives the structural deficit in years without external shocks.

What it means for the wider macro

A goods deficit of €8.7 billion in a single quarter is large relative to Portugal's own economy and relative to the services-and-tourism surplus that normally offsets it. Q1 is also the seasonally weakest period for tourism receipts, so the offsetting current-account effect from inbound travel will not arrive in the data until the Q2 and Q3 prints land in late summer.

For households, the through-line is inflation pressure on energy and on imported consumer goods. For the Bank of Portugal, the print sits alongside its March economic bulletin that already revised 2026 GDP growth down to 1.8% and inflation up to 2.8%, both citing the Middle East conflict as the dominant risk. For Joaquim Miranda Sarmento at Finanças, the trade widening is one more reason the extraordinary-profits tax on energy companies that the government is finalising looks defensible on revenue grounds — even if the underlying Brent move below $100 since 7 May will start to relieve the next monthly print.

The April customs file is due from INE in early June. That release will be the first read on whether the Brent break-down translates into a smaller energy bill quickly enough to slow the deficit's run-rate before the second quarter closes.