Greece Import Trade Data: $88.61B in 2023, Down 9.56%

The Crude Behind Greece's Refined-Fuel Export Business

Greece imported $88.61 billion worth of goods in 2023, down 9.56% from $97.97 billion the year before. Mineral fuels led every category by a wide margin, worth $24.62 billion, or 27.79% of the total, the raw crude oil that Greek refineries process into the fuel exports covered on the other side of this pairing. Machinery and mechanical appliances ranked second at 6.77% ($5.99 billion), and electrical machinery followed closely behind at 6.69% ($5.92 billion).

Vehicles took fourth at 5.43% ($4.81 billion), a category that flows in both directions since Greece manufactures very few cars of its own and relies on imports for nearly its entire domestic fleet. Pharmaceutical products contributed 4.94% ($4.38 billion), covering the branded and specialty drugs that Greece's own generic-focused industry does not typically produce. An unspecified "Commodities not specified according to kind" category added 3.37% ($2.99 billion), and plastics contributed 3.17% ($2.81 billion). Organic chemicals added 2.73% ($2.42 billion), a category tied to Greece's broader chemical and industrial manufacturing base. Iron and steel took 2.05% ($1.82 billion), and meat and edible offal closed out the top ten at 1.94% ($1.72 billion), reflecting a domestic livestock sector that does not fully cover national demand.

That mineral fuels total does not come from nowhere. Iraq ranks second among the crude oil suppliers feeding Hellenic Petroleum, Greece's largest refiner, with Kazakhstan, Iraq, Russia, and Egypt historically forming the company's top crude sources before Saudi Arabia was added to further diversify supply. Iraq and Kazakhstan both appear among Greece's top ten overall import suppliers in this data, a pattern that lines up directly with which countries actually supply the crude Greece's refineries turn into the fuel it exports across the region.

Germany and China Top a List That Also Includes Crude Suppliers

Germany was Greece's largest supplier in 2023 at 10.12% ($8.97 billion), and China followed at 8.42% ($7.46 billion). Italy took third at 7.49% ($6.64 billion), rounding out a top three that made up 26.03% of total import value, similar in scale to the concentration seen on Greece's export side.

Iraq ranked fourth at 6.41% ($5.68 billion), and the Netherlands added 5.87% ($5.20 billion), a share partly inflated by the Netherlands' role as a major European shipping and transshipment hub rather than purely domestic Dutch production. France contributed 4.27% ($3.78 billion), and Kazakhstan took 4.14% ($3.66 billion), the second crude-oil supplier to appear in Greece's top ten. Spain added 3.52% ($3.12 billion), Bulgaria contributed 3.42% ($3.03 billion), and Turkey closed out the top ten at 3.32% ($2.95 billion), a substantial trading relationship despite the countries' long-running political tensions. Every remaining supplier outside the top three sits below 7% of the total, spreading the rest of the import value across a genuinely wide set of European, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian trading partners.

A Steep Pullback From an Energy-Crisis Peak

Greece's import total climbed sharply through most of the five-year window before easing back in 2023. It stood at $62.20 billion in 2019, then fell to $55.53 billion in 2020 as the pandemic disrupted global trade. It rebounded strongly to $77.29 billion in 2021, then surged further to a record $97.97 billion in 2022, a year defined by the same soaring global energy prices that pushed up Greece's fuel export figures over the same period.

The 2023 total of $88.61 billion, down 9.56% from that peak, marks one of the sharper pullbacks covered on this site, a bigger drop than the 4.37% decline seen on Greece's export side that same year. That gap makes sense given how the two totals relate. Import value has to cover the full cost of the crude oil coming in, while the export total only reflects the value added through refining. When crude prices ease, the import bill tends to fall by more in dollar terms than the finished-fuel export total does, since a smaller share of that export value was ever tied to the raw material cost in the first place. A refiner's margin is the difference between what it pays for crude and what it earns selling finished fuel. That margin can stay relatively stable even while the underlying crude price swings sharply in either direction. That is exactly the kind of asymmetry visible when comparing Greece's import and export totals side by side across this same stretch of years.