Fall In Trade In Services Surplus

The January 2010 deficit in value on the balance of trade in goods and services was £3.8bn, in December it was £2.6bn. Trade in goods was £7.9bn in deficit compared with £7bn in December and trade in services had a balance of £4.2bn, down from £4.4bn in December 2009. When the volatile items are excluded the figure for the volume of exports was 6% lower and the volume of imports was 1.2% lower than December. Export prices were 0.6% lower than December but import prices rose by 0.6%.

At the commodity level, in January 2010 compared with December 2009, exports of consumer goods were up by £23m and imports down by £222m, exports of cars were down £146m and imports down by £215m. Exports of chemicals were down £369m and imports up by £239m, semi-manufactured goods other than chemicals imports were up £332m and exports down by £65m.

The trade in services surplus got smaller by £0.2bn in January 2010 to £4.2bn. In December the surplus was £4.4bn. Exports fell by £0.1bn while imports rose by £0.1bn to £8.9bn.

Geographically, the deficit in trade in goods with the EU narrowed to £3.2bn from £3.6bn. EU exports fell by £0.2bn to £11.1bn and imports by £0.7bn to £14.2bn. There was an increase in the export of intermediate goods of £18m and imports of intermediate goods fell by £70m. The export of capital goods fell by £54m and the imports of capital goods by £145m. Imports of chemicals increased during the month by £64m and exports fell by £102m and consumer goods exports fell by £46m while imports fell by £225m. The trade in goods deficit with non-EU countries grew by £1.4bn to £4.8bn. Exports to non-EU countries fell by 12.5% to £8.4bn but non-EU imports increased by 1.6% or £0.2bn to £13.2bn.

The US was the only country in the G7 group with whom the level of exports changed significantly between December and January. Exports to the US fell by £0.5bn. There were no significant changes in the level of exports with any of the G7 countries. Switzerland was the only other country with whom the were any significant changes where imports increased by £0.5bn.

Changes in key commodity volumes between December and January include exports of food, drink and tobacco down 9.2% and imports 4.7%, exports of basic materials decreased by 24.6% and imports by 1.1%, exports of cars decreased by 9.3% and imports by 15.5%. The increase in exports was in consumer goods (other than cars) where the increase was 1.1% together with a decrease in imports of 6.2%.

The terms of trade in January decreased because export prices fell by 0.6% and import prices increased by 0.6%. Excluding the volatile items (the oil price effect) export prices fell by 1.3% but import prices rose by 0.7%.