ZURICH, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Switzerland and China have completed negotiations on an updated free trade deal which will \u200cincrease Swiss access to its third biggest trading \u200cpartner, Swiss officials said on Thursday. <\/p>\n
Swiss president Guy Parmelin and China’s Commerce \u200bMinister Wang Wentao announced the conclusion of the talks after a meeting in Bern. <\/p>\n
Under the agreement, 99.8% of Swiss exports can enter the Chinese market duty free, upgrading an existing deal \u200cwhere the terms applied \u2060to only around half of Swiss shipments. <\/p>\n
Almost all Chinese exports to Switzerland are duty free under \u2060the existing 2014 free trade agreement between the two countries, Beijing’s first such deal with an economy in continental Europe. <\/p>\n
Other areas \u200bcovered \u200bin the new agreement include \u200brules of origin and trade \u200cfacilitation, trade in services, digital trade, competition, and economic and technical cooperation. <\/p>\n
China is Switzerland’s third biggest trade partner after Germany and the United States, with bilateral trade amounting to 46 billion Swiss francs ($57.6 billion) so far in 2026. <\/p>\n
Trade between the \u200ctwo countries has expanded from 31.7 \u200bbillion francs in 2015 to 51.2 \u200bbillion francs last \u200byear, according to figures from the Swiss customs \u200coffice, with China a big \u200bmarket for Swiss \u200bchemicals, pharmaceuticals, precision instruments and watches. <\/p>\n
Once the legal review has been completed, a signing of the deal is \u200bexpected later this \u200cyear, before the domestic approval processes in each country \u200btake place. <\/p>\n
($1 = 0.7983 Swiss francs) <\/p>\n
(Reporting by John Revill and \u200bAriane LuthiEditing by Linda Pasquini) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ZURICH, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Switzerland and China have completed negotiations on an updated free trade deal which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[14603,20624,276,28401,18092,17,57392],"class_list":["post-118036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-free-trade-agreement","tag-swiss-exports","tag-swiss-francs","tag-swiss-officials","tag-swiss-president","tag-switzerland","tag-trade-partner"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117128673752147593","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}