Switzerland has gradually started trading more outside of the bloc than inside it since the financial crash of 2008, which left EU members’ economies worse off than the other potential markets, Swiss newspaper Blick has reported.
By the time Britain has left the bloc, less than half of Switzerland’s exports will be traded into the EU, according to the paper.
The country’s Federal Customs Administration announced this week: “Exports are at an all-time high.”
Swiss exporters sold 220.4billion francs worth of goods in 2017, an increase of 4.7 percent on the previous year.
The paper adds that exports to the EU increased by just 3.5 percent.
Before the financial crash around 63 per cent of Swiss exports went to Brussels, while it was 10 percent less than that last year.
Switzerland’s exports to the bloc will drop even further once the UK has left in March 2019, according to Blick.
Yngve Abrahamsen, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Economic Research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, said: “The growing importance of the pharmaceutical and watch industries mean that more was exported to non-european countries.”
The pharmaceutical sector in Switzerland is said to have long taken over the mechanical engineering, electrical and metal industries.
Switzerland exports fewer pharmaceutical products to Europe than other EU member countries, with firms such as Roche and Novartis finding the US to be a more important customer.
Switzerland’s watch industry is strongly geared towards Asia, with only 41 per cent of exports going to the EU.
The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) has explained that EU countries have suffered more from the financial crisis than Switzerland’s customers out of it.
The strong appreciation of the Swiss franc again the euro ensured the price competitiveness of Swiss products in the eurozone was severely weakened.
SECO spokesman Fabian Maienfisch said: “Due to these difficult circumstances in Europe, many Swiss companies have tried to diversify both qualitatively and geographically.”
Alexis Bill-Körber, an economist at the Economic Research Institute BAK Basel Economics, said: “Many emerging economies have not yet completed their catching-up process and will continue to grow faster than the established industrial nations.”
Switzerland Global Enterprise (S-GE) supports Swiss export companies in opening up new markets to sell into.
S-GE CEO Daniel Küng said: “We explicitly support greater diversification. Just so that our companies can position themselves early in promising markets.”
Küng does admit that the EU is still important for the exports industry, and added: “For SMEs in particular, European markets are still mostly the top address. For companies with fewer resources, this represents the easiest step into the international business.”
Additional reporting by Monika Pellenberg