Türkiye’s foreign trade deficit rose 0.9% year-over-year to $8.34 billion (TL 162.24 billion) in March, official data suggested Friday.
Exports rose 4.4% year-over-year to $23.6 billion, while imports jumped 3.4% to $31.9 billion, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) reported.
Excluding energy products and non-monetary gold, Türkiye saw a foreign trade deficit of $21.2 billion last month.
Accounting for a major part of Türkiye’s imports, the energy bill decreased by 30.5% year-over-year to $5.84 billion, the data revealed. It accounted for 18.3% of the overall import figures in March.
Crude oil imports in March showed a 5.2% decrease to 2.52 million tons of crude, compared to 2.66 million tons in March last year.
In the January-March period, the trade gap grew 30.7% year-over-year to $34.7 billion, as per TurkStat.
Exports increased 2.5% to $61.6 billion, while imports jumped 11.1% to $96.3 billion. The exports-to-imports coverage ratio fell to 64% in the three-month period, compared to 69.4% last year.
Türkiye's top trading partner Germany received $5.5 billion worth of its goods in the first quarter, followed by the U.S. at $3.7 billion, Italy at $3.2 billion, Russia at $3.1 billion and the U.K. at $1.9 million.
On the other side of the ledger, the top country for Türkiye's imports from January through March was Russia with $13.1 billion, followed by China with $10.4 billion, Switzerland with $9.2 billion, Germany with $6.6 billion and the U.S. with $3.7 billion.
