Trade and investment relations between the United Kingdom and Serbia continued expanding through 2025, with total bilateral trade reaching approximately £1.2 billion, highlighting Serbia’s growing integration into European industrial, technology and services supply chains despite wider geopolitical and macroeconomic volatility.
According to the latest UK Department for Business and Trade factsheet released on 14 May 2026, total trade in goods and services between the two countries increased by 7.5% year-on-year, equivalent to an additional £87 million in current prices compared with the previous reporting period.
The figures reveal a rapidly evolving structure of Serbia’s external economy.
UK exports to Serbia reached £649 million, rising 10.4%, while imports from Serbia increased by 4.5% to approximately £598 million. The resulting trade balance shifted into a UK surplus of approximately £51 million, a notable reversal from earlier years when Serbia frequently maintained stronger export positioning in bilateral trade.
The longer-term trajectory is even more significant.
UK–Serbia trade has more than doubled since 2016, when bilateral trade stood at approximately £518 million, rising steadily to £1.247 billion in 2025. The data illustrate how Serbia is increasingly integrating into Western European commercial networks beyond traditional EU-core markets.
A particularly important trend is the growing weight of services and technology within bilateral trade.
Services accounted for approximately 45.6% of UK exports to Serbia and 41% of UK imports from Serbia. Telecommunications, computer and information services emerged as one of the fastest-growing categories, with UK exports of those services to Serbia increasing by 76.5% year-on-year.
That expansion aligns closely with Serbia’s broader transformation into a regional ICT and engineering hub.
The data increasingly suggest that bilateral UK–Serbia trade is evolving beyond conventional manufacturing exchange into a hybrid industrial-digital relationship involving software engineering, telecommunications, business services and advanced industrial supply chains.
The composition of goods trade reinforces that interpretation.
The UK’s leading exports to Serbia included beverages and tobacco, mechanical power generators, industrial vehicles and pharmaceutical products. Meanwhile, Serbia’s leading exports to the UK included vegetables and fruit, automotive-related products, industrial machinery and electrical goods.
The automotive and machinery segments are particularly important because they reflect Serbia’s increasing integration into European industrial production networks.
At the same time, the rapid expansion of ICT-related services confirms Serbia’s emergence as a competitive digital-services exporter within Europe’s broader outsourcing and engineering ecosystem.
Another notable feature is the dominance of remote digital service delivery.
According to the report, approximately 74.1% of UK services exports to Serbia and 63.1% of UK services imports from Serbia were conducted through “Mode 1” trade — remote cross-border service delivery without physical movement of people.
This effectively highlights the increasingly digital nature of bilateral economic integration.
For Serbia, that trend carries strategic significance because digital services exports are structurally less exposed to energy-price volatility, transport disruptions and future carbon-border mechanisms such as CBAM compared with traditional manufacturing exports.
The report also reveals the still relatively modest but stable level of direct investment integration.
UK foreign direct investment stock in Serbia reached approximately £227 million by the end of 2024, while Serbian FDI stock in the UK stood at approximately £245 million. Although these figures remain relatively small in global terms, they indicate a gradually maturing bilateral investment relationship.
The broader macroeconomic projections presented in the report suggest Serbia is expected to continue climbing gradually within global GDP rankings.
IMF forecasts cited in the factsheet project Serbia’s nominal GDP rising from approximately $90.1 billion in 2024 to $122 billion by 2027, while GDP per capita is projected to increase from $13,700 to approximately $19,000 during the same period.
However, the projections also highlight structural vulnerabilities.
Serbia’s current account deficit is expected to remain elevated at between approximately 4% and 5.7% of GDP, while total investment as a share of GDP gradually declines from 25% in 2024 toward approximately 21.7% by 2031.
This suggests Serbia’s growth model remains heavily dependent on continued foreign investment inflows, industrial exports and external financing conditions.
The UK report therefore arrives at an important moment for Serbia’s broader economic positioning.
As Europe undergoes industrial restructuring driven by decarbonization, AI expansion, supply-chain diversification and geopolitical fragmentation, Serbia increasingly occupies a hybrid role: part manufacturing platform, part digital-services exporter and part strategic nearshoring destination positioned between EU and non-EU markets.
The composition of UK–Serbia trade increasingly reflects that transition.
Industrial goods, machinery and automotive supply chains remain central, but digital services, telecommunications and software-related trade are becoming progressively more important within the bilateral relationship.
For Serbia, this dual-track structure may prove strategically valuable. Traditional industrial exports continue anchoring manufacturing employment and infrastructure investment, while ICT and services exports gradually increase resilience against carbon-related trade barriers and wider industrial volatility affecting Europe’s heavy manufacturing sectors.
The UK factsheet ultimately shows that Serbia is no longer perceived merely as a low-cost Balkan manufacturing market. It is increasingly emerging as a diversified mid-sized European economy integrating simultaneously into industrial, logistics, technology and digital-services value chains.
