The Steepest Fall This Cycle: Mineral fuels and oils

The mirror this cycle bent hardest around one commodity family, and the shape of the bend deserves a moment of attention. Mineral fuels and oils, HS27, saw exports across all 27 EU reporters fall €339.5B year-over-year, a drop of -14.7% from 2024 to 2025. Imports in the same family fell further still: €589.3B, -13.8%. Two currents, same direction, different magnitudes.

That asymmetry matters. When the import leg falls harder in absolute terms than the export leg, the mirror is telling us something about consumption more than about competitiveness. The bloc is not simply selling less energy outward. It is pulling in dramatically less as well.

Precious stones and metals, HS71, moved the other way — imports up €127.5B, +28.4%. I note it not as counter-narrative but as texture. Capital is finding somewhere to sit while the fuel corridor thins.

Turn to seasonality on the Dutch leg, where so much of the HS27 flow physically transits. Exports into NL peak in Oct at an index of 1.138 and trough in Dec at 0.874, averaged 2021–2025. The channel breathes on a calendar you can almost set a watch to.

For Jul, the index reads 1.056. Near baseline. Volume, in other words, offers little directional steer this month — the seasonal current is neither pulling nor pushing with conviction. Which means whatever signal you read into the next print will have to come from the year-over-year collapse itself, not the monthly wave.

Read together, the flows point toward continued softness in the HS27 corridor, and toward upward pressure on the search for whatever fills the space energy used to occupy on the ledger. This is a reading of the flows, not a price call.

This post is informational, derived from descriptive EU customs-clearing statistics (Eurostat COMEXT). It is not financial or investment advice and contains no price forecast. Trade flows describe what already moved; they do not predict prices.