Who are South Korea’s largest trading partners?

Read this before the table: goods only, and the names are the source’s

These are customs figures. They count goods crossing the border and they do not include services — shipping, tourism, royalties, software, finance. For some partners services are large, so a goods balance is not a current-account balance and we do not call it one. Partner names come from the source; we normalise spelling only so the page reads in English, and never reassign a territory. Anything we have no correction for is printed exactly as the source wrote it.

This is data, not advice. Nothing here says a partner is good, risky, over-exposed or under-exposed, and no averages are computed.

The twenty-five largest, by two-way trade

Two-way trade is exports plus imports. Balance is exports minus imports — a plus sign means South Korea sold more than it bought.

The biggest partner and the biggest surplus are different countries

China is first by trade value. It is not first by balance. The United States produced a surplus of $77.8 billion over these 12 months, about 4.9 times the $16.0 billion from China — on 71% as much two-way trade. Size tells you how much moves. It does not tell you which direction it moves in.

Billions of US dollars, summed over 12 months. 161 partners are in surplus and 79 in deficit, with 3 exactly level — surplus is the ordinary case, and the deficits are concentrated in a few large ones.

One-way partners and two-way partners

A partner can be large and still be almost entirely a destination, or almost entirely a supplier. Dividing the balance by two-way trade says which. Among the twenty-five largest, Hong Kong is the most one-sided at 87% — South Korea sells there far more than it buys. The most even is Malaysia at 2%.

Put that beside the size ranking and the two do not line up. China is the largest partner by value, and on this measure it is 5% — 3rd most even of the twenty-five. Being the biggest says nothing about which way the goods go.

Ranked among the twenty-five largest partners only. In a very small partner a one-sided ratio is common and says little, so we do not rank the whole list on it.

A yearly figure hides the months that went the other way

8 of the twenty-five largest partners changed direction at least once inside these 12 months — a surplus month and a deficit month in the same year. Summed over a year they show one sign, and the sign is true; it is just not the whole shape.

• China — 9 surplus months, 3 deficit months; the year nets to +$16.0 billion
• Australia — 1 surplus month, 11 deficit months; the year nets to −$14.8 billion
• Malaysia — 5 surplus months, 7 deficit months; the year nets to −$0.8 billion
• Netherlands — 5 surplus months, 7 deficit months; the year nets to +$1.0 billion
• Canada — 11 surplus months, 1 deficit month; the year nets to +$2.5 billion
• Indonesia — 2 surplus months, 10 deficit months; the year nets to −$3.4 billion
• France — 1 surplus month, 11 deficit months; the year nets to −$3.2 billion
• Brazil — 6 surplus months, 6 deficit months; the year nets to +$2.3 billion

How concentrated is it, and what is in the tail?

The other side of that is the tail, and it is the part nobody counts: 123 of the 243 partners — 51% of the list — are each under one hundredth of one percent of total trade, and 0.19% between them. They are real trade with real countries, and a top-ten table makes all 123 of them disappear at once.

Related

The full month-by-month file for every partner: the Korea trade dataset (free CSV). Company-level concentration in the equity market, measured the same way: what share of KOSPI is each company. What we hold on company accounts: financials coverage. See what else is in the catalogue.

Questions