Portugal’s Exports to the Nordics Reach €1.74 Billion in January–August, Up 18% — Finland Doubles in August, and Zinc and Copper Concentrates Account for Most of the Gain

Portugal’s goods exports to Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland reached €1,736.9 million in January–August 2026, up 18.1 percent from €1,471.0 million a year earlier, according to the country tables that accompany the August international trade release published by Statistics Portugal (INE) on 9 October. Total Portuguese exports grew 2.9 percent over the same eight months. August itself was uneven: exports to Finland doubled, to €32.5 million, exports to Denmark rose 17.7 percent, and exports to Sweden, the largest of the five markets, slipped 1.1 percent after a strong July. Eurostat’s product breakdown of INE’s figures, which currently runs to July, shows what has been driving the year: copper and zinc ores and concentrates account for 58 percent of the growth in exports to the region.

INE’s own headline was a sixth consecutive month of export growth. Exports rose 6.8 percent year on year in August, to €5,361.9 million, and imports 2.8 percent, to €8,353.3 million, narrowing the monthly trade deficit by €115 million to €2,991 million. Fuels and lubricants did much of the lifting, with exports up 61.7 percent, mainly on price; without them, exports grew 2.8 percent. For January–August, INE reports exports up 2.9 percent and imports up 5.3 percent, and notes that processing transactions without a change of ownership are holding the export figure down: excluding them, exports grew 6.7 percent.

The eight-month picture

INE’s commentary does not discuss the Nordic countries, but the release’s annex carries monthly exports to every EU member state and a year-to-date table for non-EU partners, Norway and Iceland among them. NorthSouth HQ compiled the five. In nominal terms, their combined total is the highest for the first eight months of any year in Eurostat’s Comext series for Portugal, which starts in 1988; the previous high was €1,621.9 million in 2022. Sweden, at €776.4 million (up 12.6 percent), and Denmark, at €428.5 million (up 8.9 percent), also set January–August highs. Finland’s €307.1 million, up 59.5 percent, is a rebound rather than a record — exports reached €367.3 million in the same months of 2024 before falling back in 2025 — but it is already within €19 million of Finland’s total for the whole of 2025. The Nordic share of Portuguese exports rose from 2.8 to 3.2 percent, and the five countries account for €265.9 million of the €1,518.9 million net increase in Portuguese exports, roughly one euro in six.

Source: INE, Estatísticas do Comércio Internacional, August 2026 (published 9 October 2026), tables Q004, Q009 and Q016; NorthSouth HQ calculations. 2026 figures are preliminary. Norway and Iceland are published as year-to-date totals only.

August: Finland doubles, Sweden pauses

August is the seasonal low point for Portuguese exports, when much of industry stops for holidays — total exports were 28.4 percent lower than in July — so the meaningful comparison is with August 2025. On that basis, exports to the three Nordic EU members came to €144.1 million, up 17.8 percent, against 6.8 percent for exports as a whole. Finland supplied three-quarters of the increase, with €32.5 million against €16.2 million a year earlier, after a July in which exports there had grown just 7.4 percent. Denmark took €42.1 million, up 17.7 percent. Sweden took €69.6 million, 1.1 percent below August 2025, after exports jumped 29.6 percent in July. Norway and Iceland, outside the EU, appear only as year-to-date totals, and Norway’s year-to-date growth slowed from 23.5 percent at the end of July, as published last month, to 11.6 percent. That is largely a base effect: in August 2025 Portugal shipped €31.7 million of goods to Norway, against €17.2 million in August 2023 and €11.5 million in August 2024, and €16.4 million of it was mineral fuels, according to Eurostat’s product breakdown of INE’s data.

Most of the growth came out of the ground

INE’s monthly release does not break exports down by product and partner, but Eurostat’s Comext database does, from the same INE returns; its latest update, on 15 September, runs to July. Exports to the five countries under chapter 26 of the Combined Nomenclature — ores, slag and ash — rose from €208.2 million in January–July 2025 to €360.6 million in January–July 2026. That €152.3 million increase is 58 percent of the €260.8 million by which exports to the region grew, and it lifted ores from 15.8 to 22.9 percent of everything Portugal sold the Nordics. The effect is largest in Finland, where zinc ores and concentrates rose from €27.3 million to €91.8 million and copper ores and concentrates from €33.7 million to €52.2 million: together €83.1 million of the €100.1 million rise in Finnish sales. Ore shipments to Finland in the first quarter alone were worth €106.5 million, against €20.2 million a year earlier. Last month this publication suggested that Finland’s lumpy first-quarter surge pointed to a few large capital-goods shipments; the product data show it was mine output instead. Copper ores and concentrates to Sweden rose from €92.1 million to €130.5 million, and zinc ores and concentrates to Norway from €55.3 million to €86.1 million.

Trade statistics do not name shippers or buyers, but the map is consistent. Portugal’s copper and zinc concentrates come from the Iberian Pyrite Belt in the Alentejo, where the largest operation is Neves-Corvo, bought by Sweden’s Boliden from Lundin Mining in April 2025; the Aljustrel mine, operated by Almina, also exports base-metal concentrates. Each of the three destinations has a Boliden smelter that runs on concentrate: the Rönnskär copper smelter at Skelleftehamn in Sweden, the Harjavalta copper and nickel plant and the Kokkola zinc plant in Finland, and the Odda zinc smelter in western Norway. An intra-group flow is the likeliest reading, although sales to other buyers cannot be ruled out from the statistics. Portugal’s export declarations also bear out this publication’s September reading of two consignments that Statistics Sweden recorded as copper scrap: on the Portuguese side, no copper scrap went to Sweden this year, but copper concentrate did in both months concerned, €16.0 million in May and €40.7 million in July. Those July shipments explain most of Sweden’s July jump: of the €25.0 million increase on July 2025 in the figures INE first published, €18.1 million was copper ores and concentrates.

Take the ores out and the growth is slower, but still well ahead of the national rate. Exports to the five countries excluding chapter 26 rose 9.8 percent in January–July, from €1,107.5 million to €1,216.0 million, against 2.5 percent for all Portuguese exports over the same months. The rest of the gain sits in a handful of lines. To Sweden, electrical machinery and equipment rose from €101.4 million to €139.6 million and pharmaceuticals from €8.5 million to €24.1 million, while optical and measuring instruments fell from €55.2 million to €36.6 million. To Denmark, vehicles and parts rose from €50.5 million to €78.3 million and articles of stone from €4.7 million to €17.9 million, while organic chemicals fell by €17.7 million. Exports to Finland excluding ores grew 14.8 percent, helped by vehicles and articles of iron and steel, and more than half of Iceland’s increase was electrical equipment. The Nordic statistics offices’ own import tables give the fuller product picture for Sweden and Denmark.

Imports and the surplus

Imports from the five countries rose 2.7 percent in January–August, to €1,372.5 million. Denmark stands out: purchases rose 22.5 percent to €488.9 million, and 56.4 percent in August alone, to €73.2 million. In the product data to July, a €45.0 million fall in Danish pharmaceuticals was more than offset by cereals, worth €24.4 million against almost nothing a year earlier, and by organic chemicals, electrical equipment, perfumery and cosmetics, and machinery. Imports from Sweden fell 4.1 percent to €610.9 million, from Finland 6.1 percent to €198.9 million and from Norway 24.2 percent to €59.8 million; Iceland rose 38.0 percent to €13.9 million. As a result, Portugal’s goods surplus with the five countries widened from €134.2 million to €364.4 million. With Sweden it more than tripled, from €52.7 million to €165.6 million; with Finland a €19.3 million deficit became a €108.2 million surplus; with Norway the surplus grew from €104.2 million to €144.6 million. Denmark is the exception: Portugal’s deficit there widened from €5.4 million to €60.4 million, and in August Danish imports were strong enough to leave Portugal with a €16.0 million deficit against the three Nordic EU members combined.

Two cautions apply. The first is that the Norwegian import line understates the corridor’s best-known flow. Eurostat’s product detail to July shows only €14.8 million of fish from Norway, down from €41.4 million, although Portugal is the largest market for Norwegian clipfish, according to the Norwegian Seafood Council; the same tables show €108.9 million of fish arriving from Sweden. INE records goods arriving from elsewhere in the EU against the member state they were dispatched from, so Norwegian salt cod cleared in Sweden — which makes fish the largest line in Sweden’s exports to Portugal, according to Statistics Sweden — counts as Swedish. The second is volatility: in markets this size, a few concentrate vessels or a single fuel cargo can halve or double a country’s monthly total, as Finland and Norway have shown this year. Part of the growth is also price: INE’s export unit-value index rose 6.8 percent in August, continuing an upward trend that began in March, and Boliden described metal prices as favourable in its second-quarter report.

What comes next

INE’s revisions to earlier months were small this time: the January–July total for Sweden, Denmark and Finland moved by about €1 million, Sweden’s July increase is now 29.6 percent rather than the 30.3 percent first published, and Iceland’s year-to-date figure is slightly below the January–July total published in September, which means earlier months were revised down. INE warns that future revisions may be larger than usual because of changes to the electronic customs declaration systems. The next reference points are Eurostat’s August product data, which will show whether Finland’s August doubling was another concentrate shipment, and Boliden’s third-quarter report on 29 October. For Portuguese exporters outside mining, the figure to keep in mind is the one without the ores: sales to the Nordics up close to 10 percent to July, in a year in which national exports are growing by less than 3 percent.