German trade surplus beats June consensus, second quarter still weak

Germany’s headline non-seasonally adjusted trade surplus rose to €16.3bn in June, from a revised €12.5bn in May, according to fresh data released on Monday.

That was well above consensus expectations for €13.5bn, while net revisions added €0.2bn, Destatis reported.

While the trade surplus did rebound at the end of the second quarter, the story over the whole quarter was one of a “significant” decline, Pantheon Macroeconomics noted.

The seasonally-adjusted surplus rose only slightly, to €13.6bn, after a revised €12.8bn for May.

Exports outpaced imports by a small margin, rising by 1.3% on month-on-month compared to a 0.6% increase in imports, though the quarter as a whole “wasn’t pretty”, said Pantheon’s chief eurozone economist Claus Vistesen.

The nominal trade surplus in goods plunged by nearly 23% on the quarter, pointing to a fall in net exports for the period, notwithstanding the potential for offsetting shifts in the deflators.

“In addition, the divergence between the exports and imports remained significant through H1 as a whole,” Vistesen said.

Exports increased by just over 6% in the first six months of the year, much less than that 10.2% leap in imports.

“The main driver of the increase in imports has been demand from non-eurozone EU economies, consistent with the message from Eurostat’s aggregate eurozone trade data, Asia - China and India - and, curiously, South Africa.”