What Britain imports and exports in bearings, fasteners, seals, valves, pumps, gears, springs and the other mechanical components that go into machines. Forty-one HS6 commodity headings, seven years, both directions, split EU and non-EU, with the partner countries for each.
HMRC publishes the underlying trade records, but nobody publishes them grouped as engineering components and reconciled into a single series. This repository exists to make that grouping open, checkable and reusable.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
data/uk-engineering-component-trade.json |
One record per commodity heading per year, with imports and exports each carrying total value, the EU and non-EU split, net mass, and the top 15 partner countries by value |
Each record carries hs6, category, hs6_description, hs4_description, live_cn8_codes,
year, and imports / exports objects with value_gbp, value_gbp_eu, value_gbp_non_eu,
net_mass_kg, months_present and partners.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Imports | £6,963,282,877 |
| Exports | £5,407,429,054 |
| Trade deficit | £1,555,853,823 |
| EU share of imports | 55.8% |
| Non-EU share of imports | 44.2% |
Largest import partners in 2025: Germany 17.6%, China 13.4%, United States 12.5%, France 9.4%, Italy 7.6%.
Largest categories by import value: plumbing and pipeline fittings (£1.36bn), engineering materials (£954m), engineering hardware (£848m), fasteners and fixings (£707m), power transmission (£564m).
Springs are the only category where exports are trivial against imports: £29.1m in, £3.7m out.
| Year | Imports | Exports | Deficit | EU share of imports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | £6,192,766,414 | £4,144,489,064 | £2,048,277,350 | 55.0% |
| 2020 | £4,772,039,561 | £3,676,535,915 | £1,095,503,646 | 53.6% |
| 2021 | £5,760,342,356 | £4,146,152,587 | £1,614,189,769 | 46.2% |
| 2022 | £7,010,996,127 | £4,764,680,489 | £2,246,315,638 | 52.8% |
| 2023 | £6,794,289,760 | £5,204,601,444 | £1,589,688,316 | 57.1% |
| 2024 | £6,951,082,993 | £5,330,161,000 | £1,620,921,993 | 56.3% |
| 2025 | £6,963,282,877 | £5,407,429,054 | £1,555,853,823 | 55.8% |
The 2021 EU share is not comparable with the years around it. How the UK collects EU trade data changed after Brexit: EU arrivals moved from Intrastat survey returns to customs declarations, phased across 2021 and 2022. The 46.2% figure for 2021 reflects that transition at least as much as it reflects any change in sourcing. Treat 2019-2020 and 2022-2025 as two comparable blocks and 2021 as a break in the series.
For each HS6 heading, every CN8 subheading in the range <hs6>00 to <hs6>99 is summed across all
twelve months, for all four HMRC flow types: EU imports, EU exports, non-EU imports, non-EU exports.
Aggregating at HS6 rather than picking individual CN8 codes matters. The CN8 classification is
revised annually and codes are retired without replacement. A fixed CN8 list silently returns zero
once a code dies, and the gap looks identical to genuinely absent trade. Every record here carries
months_present, which is 12 for all 287 records.
The 41 headings were selected as those covering mechanical engineering components. That grouping is
ours, not an official classification, and the category field is our label. Anyone reproducing this
should read the heading list as the definition, not the category names.
- Partner shares are not exhaustive. The top 15 partners per heading per year are kept, which covers 92.1% of 2025 import value and between 92.1% and 94.2% across the series. The remainder is spread across long tails and is not attributed to any country.
- Country of dispatch is not country of production. The Netherlands and Belgium host the distribution hubs that much of Europe's freight passes through, so their figures overstate what is made there. The sharpest movements in the series are of this kind: Denmark falls from 6.7% of imports to 1.5% between 2019 and 2025, and Belgium from 7.3% to 3.8%, while France rises from 4.7% to 9.4%. Routing changes explain movements of that shape more readily than production moving.
- Values are nominal. Nothing is adjusted for inflation or exchange-rate movement, and 2019 to
2025 covers a period of substantial price inflation in metals. A rise in value is not a rise in
volume;
net_mass_kgis included so the two can be compared. - Headings are broader than products.
732690, the largest heading here at £1.19bn, is "articles of iron or steel, not elsewhere specified". It is a residual category and it contains a great deal that is not an engineering component. - Trade is not consumption. Nothing here measures UK production, stock, or what British industry actually consumes.
See LICENSE.md. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- HMRC uktradeinfo API: https://api.uktradeinfo.com
- HMRC Overseas Trade Statistics: https://www.uktradeinfo.com/
- UK Trade Tariff, commodity codes: https://www.gov.uk/trade-tariff
- Component reference guides: https://mlc.org.uk/products