June Imports Climb Nearly 20% and Outrun Exports, Deepening Portugal's Trade Gap

Portugal's goods trade deficit widened sharply in June as imports surged far faster than exports, according to figures released on Friday, 7 August, by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE, Statistics Portugal).

Exports of goods rose 10.0% year on year in June, a respectable clip in isolation. But imports jumped 19.6% — nearly twice as fast — and the gap between the two pushed the deficit higher. The acceleration was abrupt: in May, exports had grown 5.4% and imports had actually fallen 1.9%, so June marks a decisive turn.

The result was a goods trade deficit of 3,632 million euros for the month, a worsening of 1,122 million euros compared with June 2025. Stripping out the most volatile category — transações sem transferência de propriedade (TTE, transactions without transfer of ownership, essentially goods sent abroad for processing) — the picture is similar: exports up 11.0%, imports up 17.0%, and a deficit of 3,440 million euros, some 824 million euros worse than a year earlier.

Price pressure is part of the story. INE's export unit-value index, a proxy for prices, kept rising, up 4.9% year on year (after 5.9% in May). The import unit-value index climbed 6.1% — its third consecutive positive reading, following 7.9% in May — signalling that the cost of what Portugal buys from abroad is still going up, inflating the value of the import bill even where volumes are steady.

A trade deficit is not inherently a sign of weakness: rising imports can reflect a healthy economy investing and consuming, and Portugal's export machine — from cars and machinery to textiles and food — remains a pillar of growth. But a deficit that widens because imports are outpacing exports, and because import prices are climbing, bears watching, since it drains the current account and leaves the economy more exposed to external price shocks.

The June data will feed into the broader debate over Portugal's external accounts, which have benefited in recent years from booming tourism and services exports that help offset the chronic goods deficit. Whether services can keep covering a goods gap of this size, month after month, is the question the latest numbers sharpen.

INE's figures were reported by the financial daily Dinheiro Vivo, drawing on the institute's monthly international-trade communiqué. A fuller read on the trend will come with July's data, due next month.