Italy was the European Union’s largest customs destination in 2025 for extra-EU imports of products classified under existing Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) codes, taking 17.6% of their value. Customs figures put the total at 111.23 billion euros, with Germany and the Netherlands each accounting for 12.7%.
Together, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands handled about 43% of the aggregate. Calculations based on the rounded shares indicate imports worth roughly 19.6 billion euros for Italy and about 14.1 billion euros each for Germany and the Netherlands; these are indicative estimates, not separate customs extracts.
Spain accounted for 7.8% of the bloc’s import value, Belgium for 6.9%, France for 6.5%, Poland for 6.1% and Romania for 4.2%. The ranking includes products from exempt origins, a qualification relevant to markets that buy substantial quantities of Scandinavian aluminium or electricity.
Italy’s position reflects its metals transformation, machinery, construction-materials and manufacturing ecosystems. Flat steel, steel structures, aluminium profiles and primary metal are priority products for industrial mapping there. Germany’s industrial demand spans steel processors, automotive manufacturing and mechanical engineering, with automotive steel, advanced manufacturing and aluminium sheet among the areas to track.
The Netherlands’ share partly reflects port entry, storage, trading and onward movement of goods into the European hinterland. Goods recorded as Dutch imports may be consumed by factories elsewhere in Europe. For the Netherlands and Belgium, the business question is which import houses, warehouses and distributors supply industry across the bloc. Belgian customs flows through Antwerp can also serve industrial buyers in neighbouring countries.
Customs destination, the location of an authorised CBAM declarant and the factory that ultimately uses a material are not necessarily the same. Cross-border distribution can obscure the link between the entity on the customs file and the manufacturer absorbing a purchase-price increase. Industrial mapping should therefore start with trade corridors and trace materials through processors and contracts; the largest customs market may not be the largest final-consumption market.
CBAM-related costs create purchase-price increases and new costs for industrial supply chains, but no cost amount is specified in the figures. The import ranking alone does not establish which companies or factories will bear those costs.
