| 

Are European businesses diverting T&A trade away from the US?

Talk of European textiles and apparel businesses diverting trade away from the United States has been growing louder, and on the surface, there are plenty of reasons it sounds plausible: tariff threats, retaliation talk, and a sense that companies are quietly rewriting supply-chain playbooks. But before you follow the narrative, the first place to look is the biggest, cleanest dataset available, the one that should show a rupture earliest if one is truly underway: EU–US goods trade overall.

That macro picture is strikingly robust. In 2024, the EU exported €531.6 billion ($620.4 billion) of goods to the US and imported €333.4 billion ($389 billion), leaving a €198.2 billion surplus; exports to the US were up 5.5 per cent year on year while imports were down 4.0 per cent. Early 2025, at least in the first read, added to the puzzle rather than resolving it: Eurostat data shows EU exports to the US jumped 22.4 per cent year on year in February 2025 to €51.8 billion ($60.45 billion), with the surplus widening. Structurally, the US still sits at the centre of the EU’s external trade map, remaining the EU’s largest export partner at about 20.6 per cent of EU exports in 2024 and the second-largest import partner at about 13.7 per cent of EU imports.

And yet the diversion story does not go away, which raises the more interesting question: if the top-line numbers are holding, where would a shift actually show up first, and what would it look like inside textiles and apparel specifically, where ‘trade’ can mean far more than finished garments crossing the Atlantic?