plate 278 · 2025 data

Saudi Arabia's battery imports grew 46-fold since 2019

Saudi Arabia's imports of lithium-ion batteries (HS 850760), US$ billion, as reported by Saudi Arabia, 2017–2025.

Egypt and the Arab world
  1. 1. Egypt is set to outgrow Japan in 2027, then Russia
  2. 2. In 2025, Suez Canal traffic was under half its record
  3. 3. Egypt exports more fresh oranges than any other country
  4. 4. Egypt is the world's biggest wheat buyer
  5. 5. Saudi Arabia has more desalination capacity than the entire US
  6. 6. Three in four UAE residents are international migrants
  7. 7. Only America draws more new foreign projects than the UAE
  8. 8. Algeria outspends all of sub-Saharan Africa on its military
  9. 9. Women in MENA now outpace men at university
  10. 10. Dubai's airport handles more international travellers than Heathrow
  11. 11. The UAE sold more goods abroad than France in 2025
  12. 12. Oil now makes less than a third of Saudi power
  13. 13. Egypt now owes Russia more than any other government
  14. 14. Two-thirds of young Jordanian women in the workforce are jobless
  15. 15. Baghdad's mobile internet overtook Erbil's
  16. 16. Morocco climbed to second in world fertiliser exports
  17. 17. Algiers now has North Africa's fastest home internet
  18. 18. Saudi imports from China now top the Group of Seven
  19. 19. Syria has lost more stored water than drought-famous Iran
  20. 20. Chicken gives Egyptians twice the calories beef does
  21. 21. More young Tunisian men than women neither work nor study
  22. 22. Egypt tripled its ATMs per adult in ten years
  23. 23. Saudi Arabia's battery imports grew 46-fold since 2019
  24. 24. Viet Nam overtook China as Morocco's top smartphone supplier
$1.73 bn

Saudi Arabia's lithium-ion battery imports in 2025, up from $37.9 million in 2019: 46 times as much.

99%

of those imports came from China in 2025 ($1.71 bn of $1.73 bn), as reported by Saudi Arabia.

17th

Saudi Arabia's place among 127 reporting importers in 2025, up from 43rd of 159 in 2019: the oil giant now ranks among the top 20 battery buyers.

the numbers & method
Saudi Arabia's battery imports grew 46-fold since 2019. Source: UN Comtrade, imports of lithium-ion batteries (HS 850760), reported by Saudi Arabia, 2025.
Imports (bn)
20170.02
20190.04
20200.05
20220.22
20230.30
20251.73

Claim types Fact

UN Statistics Division, UN Comtrade (HS, annual), commodity 850760 (electric accumulators, lithium-ion), imports reported by Saudi Arabia from World and from China, US$ (CIF, as reported by the importer), read from the UN Comtrade API via the progrss vault (un-comtrade; GUIDELINES §4.11; live re-read failed: web access refused this run). US$ million, World / China: 2017 15.6 / 8.6; 2019 37.9 / 35.4; 2020 50.9 / 44.5; 2022 215.7 / 206.1; 2023 296.7 / 284.9; 2025 1,732.9 / 1,710.2. 2018, 2021 and 2024 are not in the data loaded and are left out, not filled in. 46-fold = 1,732.9 / 37.9 (45.7). Ranks are among reporting countries in the loaded data (159 in 2019, 127 in 2025; not every country has reported 2025 yet). Values are in current dollars; battery prices fell over the period, so volumes grew faster than shown. The data does not say what the batteries are used for (Interpretation not drawn).

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