Markets

Mapped: The World’s Largest Exporters in 2018

Published

5 years ago

October 3, 2019

Jeff Desjardins

The World's Largest Exporters in 2018

Visualizing the World’s Largest Exporters in 2018

Trillions of dollars of goods get traded around the world every year.

In 2018, total global exports exceeded $19 trillion, including specialized goods falling into almost every possible category imaginable.

Whether you’re talking about German cars, Bangladeshi t-shirts, Saudi oil, or Swiss milk chocolate, just about anything is available on the world market for a price – and the world’s largest exporting countries aim to take advantage.

Ranked: The 15 Largest Exporters in 2018

Today’s visualization comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it resizes countries based on their most recent export numbers, as per data from the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Let’s take a look at how the field breaks down:

Rank	Country	Exports (2018, $M)	Share of Global Total
#1	🇨🇳 China	$2,487,045	12.8%
#2	🇺🇸 United States	$1,664,085	8.6%
#3	🇩🇪 Germany	$1,560,816	8.0%
#4	🇯🇵 Japan	$738,403	3.8%
#5	🇳🇱 Netherlands	$722,668	3.7%
#6	🇰🇷 Korea, Rep.	$604,860	3.1%
#7	🇫🇷 France	$581,816	3.0%
#8	🇭🇰 Hong Kong, China	$569,241	2.9%
#9	🇮🇹 Italy	$546,643	2.8%
#10	🇬🇧 United Kingdom	$485,711	2.5%
#11	🇧🇪 Belgium	$466,724	2.4%
#12	🇲🇽 Mexico	$450,572	2.3%
#13	🇨🇦 Canada	$449,845	2.3%
#14	🇷🇺 Russia	$444,008	2.3%
#15	🇸🇬 Singapore	$412,629	2.1%

Leading the list of the world’s largest exporters is China, with a whopping $2.5 trillion of goods sent abroad in 2018. If you add in Hong Kong’s numbers, China holds 15.7% of the global export total — roughly equal to Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, France, and Singapore combined.

Coming next on the list is the U.S., which exports about $1.7 trillion of goods each year. After that comes Germany, which is the only other country to export over $1 trillion of goods per year.

Comparing U.S. and Chinese Exports

What does China export, and how does that compare to a more developed economy such as the United States?

Using data from MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity, we can see the broad breakdown of exports in both countries:

🇨🇳 China (Exports)	Share	🇺🇸 U.S. (Exports)	Share
Machines	48.5%	Machines	22.1%
Textiles	9.9%	Transportation	14.9%
Metals	7.1%	Chemical Products	13.7%
Chemical Products	4.9%	Mineral Products	11.4%
Plastics and Rubbers	4.0%	Instruments	6.8%
Instruments	3.2%	Plastics and Rubbers	5.5%
Transportation	3.2%	Vegetable Products	5.1%
Footwear and Headwear	2.6%	Metals	4.8%
Stone and Glass	1.7%	Foodstuffs	3.3%
Mineral Products	1.3%	Precious Metals	3.1%
Animal Hides	1.2%	Animal Products	2.2%
Other/Misc	12.4%	Paper Goods	2.1%
		Textiles	1.7%
		Other/Misc	3.3%

On first glance, it’s clear that China’s exports are reliant on one heavy-hitting category (Machines) to drive a whopping 48.5% of total export value. Within that broad category of machines, there are many narrower categories, including:

Broadcasting equipment (9.6% of total exports)
Computers (6.1%)
Office machine parts (3.8%)
Integrated circuits (3.3%)
Telephones (2.6%)
Electrical transformers (1.3%)
Semiconductor devices (1.2%)
Video displays (1.1%)

For the United States, machines are still important at 22.1% of exports, but three other broad categories also surpass the 10% mark: transportation, chemical products, and mineral products. This means the U.S. is generally more diversified in its major exports.

For more, see the largest export of each state on this map.