Food increases foreign sales in Milan: +9.3% in the first half year
3' min read
3' min read
The instability and fragility of the international geopolitical environment, together with the economic slowdown in China and Europe in particular, continue to hold back global trade, which, after the -10.3% drop in global demand in value recorded in 2023, is still at -6.2% in the first half of 2024.
Hardest hit, of course, are countries with a greater foreign vocation such as Italy, which lost -1.1% in exports between January and June this year. Within this, it is interesting to analyse the performance of Milan, whose companies are particularly projected into the global network.
The metropolitan city's exports were down in the first half of 2024: -2.4% trend in January-June 2024, with the first and second quarters both contracting. This result, however, is better than the dynamics of global trade, which, as mentioned above, marked -6.2%, and above all of 'potential exports', since if we had kept the export shares of the first half of 2023 unchanged, demand would have fallen by -4.7%.
It is an initial confirmation of the greater competitive resilience of local companies within the current slowdown that emerges when integrating the analysis of Istat territorial data with preliminary world trade data in value from the International Trade Committee.
A deeper reading of the data shows that the average performance of the Milan area summarises very differentiated trends between manufacturing sectors.
