In the long term, however, countries and regions outside Europe, such as India and Southeast Asia, are gaining ground. Geopolitical unrest, new competition, and protectionism are most often cited as factors that could jeopardize achieving the desired export increase.
Securing good trade agreements should help mitigate this to some extent. These are the main conclusions from the twentieth edition of Trends in Export, the annual study by Atradius and the entrepreneurs' organization evofenedex.
The majority of revenue from Dutch exporters has come from the European Union for years. In 2017, 72 percent of the revenue was generated in the EU. For 56 percent of exporting companies, the importance of the EU for their business is significant (> 50 percent of revenue). Almost half of the exporters indicate that the importance of the EU will further increase in the short to medium term.
Growth outside Europe
The importance of NAFTA is underscored when we look at the growth potential in terms of revenue increase outside Europe. Dutch exporting companies achieved the highest revenue in 2017 in Mexico (67 percent), China (62 percent), and the USA (60 percent). There is also widespread optimism for export growth to these countries in 2018.
For instance, 70 percent of exporters expect to achieve revenue growth in the USA and China, and 63 percent in Mexico. The USA and China also rank in the top 5 of countries that exporters intend to enter as new foreign markets in 2018.
Protectionism and geopolitics as the biggest obstacle to growth
Although the USA and China rank high on the list of new markets to enter, geopolitical tensions and protectionism could throw a wrench in the works. Almost 2 out of 5 exporters consider geopolitical unrest a serious threat to achieving their business objectives. For more than a quarter, they believe that protectionism could be an obstacle to good and stable trade relations in these regions.
Importance of trade agreements
A large majority (69 percent) is positive about new trade agreements that the EU wants to conclude. With Brexit on the horizon, the trade agreement with the United Kingdom is the most important agreement that needs to be reached. Almost a quarter of Dutch exporters indicated that they faced a decline in revenue to the UK in 2017. They prefer to see the UK remain within the customs union and the internal market.
For almost a third of exporting companies, TTIP, the agreement between the USA and the EU that is currently stalled in negotiations, is the most important future trade agreement. The free trade agreement with Turkey also scores highly: a quarter of exporters consider this an important trade agreement.
