Keeping Europe’s children entertained is big business. The European Union is a net importer of toys from the rest of the world, with €7.1 billion worth of the goods being imported from outside the EU in 2021, Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, said on Wednesday.
Unsurprisingly, China was the biggest supplier of toys to the EU, accounting for 83% of total toy imports in 2021, far ahead of Vietnam (4%), and the United Kingdom (2%). Around a fifth of EU toy imports went to Germany (19%), while the Netherlands and France accounted for 17% and 11%, respectively.
Credit: Eurostat
The export of toys from the EU to countries outside of the bloc were limited, but still amounted to a significant source of revenue for many countries. The main non-EU export destination for toys was the UK, which accounted for more than a fourth (27%) of all exports. This was followed by Switzerland (12%) and the United States (11%).
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These top three destinations accounted for half of extra-EU toy exports by value. More than half of the toys exported from the EU came from Czechia (34%), Germany (21%), and Belgium (7%).
In 2021, Belgium imported over 2 million tonnes of toys from outside the EU and exported 192,000 tonnes overseas.
