According to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), last year Portugal exported goods and services worth 1.2 billion euros, which compares to the 270 million euros spent on importing Angolan products.
In the previous year, in 2022, exports were slightly higher (1.4 billion euros), but imports had been significantly higher, more than 624 million euros, which explains the 24 percent increase in the favorable trade balance to Portugal in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Looking at the last six years, the balance of trade between the two countries has always been favorable to Portugal, and the year in which the balance was most balanced was 2019, when Portugal imported more than one billion euros of Angolan products, overwhelmingly oil, and exported 1.2 billion euros, which made the balance positive at just 163 million euros.
Since then, imports have fallen significantly, to 389 million in 2020, even more in 2021, to 80.5 million euros, and then rose, in 2022, to 624 million euros, falling again last year, to 270 million.
Conversely, Portuguese exports reached their highest value in the last five years in 2018, with more than 1.5 billion sales to Angola, then falling to 1.2 billion in 2019, and then to 870 million and 951 million euros in 2020 and 2021, marked by the covid-19 pandemic.
In the following two years, in 2022 and 2023, Portuguese exports to the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa increased to 1.4 and 1.2 billion euros.
With regard to products exported by Portugal, the headings 'nuclear reactors, boilers, machines, apparatus and mechanical instruments', together with 'electrical machines, apparatus and materials, and image and sound recording and reproduction apparatus' are the main categories.
Conversely, oil always represents almost all of Angola's sales to Portugal.
