Moldova now earns almost as much from selling services abroad as from shipping goods, and two thirds of the goods it does ship go to the EU.
Services exports rose 12.3% y/y to €2.84bn in 2025, level with goods exports of €2.85bn on a balance-of-payments basis, according to quarterly data from the National Bank of Moldova (NBM). In the second and third quarters of 2025 services out-earned goods outright. Merchandise exports measured by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) rose 6.4% to $3.78bn last year, and the EU took 67.5% of them, worth $2.55bn, according to its annual trade release.
The two shifts have remade a trade profile long built around wine, fruit and the Russian market, and they put Moldova’s EU accession ambitions on a commercial footing. They have not yet fixed the economy’s oldest problem. Moldova still buys about three times as much merchandise as it sells, the export base is narrow and weather-dependent, and the services boom is carried by a handful of sectors. The pivot has changed who buys Moldovan goods faster than it has changed how much the country earns.
Export promotion was one of three themes at the 11th Moldova Business Week in Chisinau from September 28 to October 2, where Prime Minister Vasile Tofan pitched Moldova to 650 delegates as a base for selling into the EU. The Investment Agency (Invest Moldova) named the first 25 companies in its new Top Exporters from Moldova ranking at the event’s export forum on October 1, a list heavy with winemakers, food processors and services firms, among them Cricova, Orhei-Vit, the Medpark hospital group and the Nicolae Testemitanu medical university.
“In 2025 Moldova’s exports reached around $7bn, 46% of them exports of services, which changes our country’s economic paradigm. Exports no longer mean only selling a product abroad. They mean integration into European value chains, the development of long-term partnerships and the creation of a more competitive economy,” Irina Tolstousov, the agency’s deputy director for export promotion, said in a statement ahead of the forum.
Two thirds to the EU
The EU share has held at about two thirds into 2026. Goods exports rose 11.7% y/y to €1.97bn in January-July, with the EU-27 taking €1.29bn, up 10.4%, or 65.3% of the total, according to the NBS release for July. The bloc’s share slipped 0.8 percentage points from a year earlier, while the CIS countries took just 6.6%.
Romania alone bought 28.3% of Moldova’s goods in the seven months, or about 43% of everything sold into the EU. Turkey was the second-largest market with 12.1%, followed by Italy (10.1%), the Czech Republic (8.0%), Ukraine (7.3%) and Germany (5.4%). The six markets together took 71.1% of exports.
Brussels has widened the door in stages. Moldovan exports to the EU grew from €1.8bn in 2021 to €2.2bn in 2024 while autonomous trade measures suspended the tariff-rate quotas in the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA), according to the European Commission. When those measures lapsed in July 2025, the two sides agreed a modernised DCFTA that raised quotas for plums, table grapes, apples and cherries and made grape juice, tomatoes and garlic duty-free, in return for wider access for EU meat and dairy and Moldova’s gradual alignment with EU production standards such as pesticide rules.
A draft Commission review now proposes giving candidate countries phased single-market access ahead of membership, with Moldova among the front-runners in line for an accession roadmap.
Seeds, harnesses and software
Farm goods still dominate the merchandise basket, and they make export growth hostage to the harvest. Oilseeds were the largest product group in January-July at 14.8% of exports, up 21.9% y/y, and cereals jumped 70% to 11.4% of the total after a better crop, NBS data show. A 50% surge in sunflower seed sales to €180mn accounted for most of the export growth in the first quarter. Alcoholic beverages, the old flagship, fell 10.2% and now make up just 5.3% of exports.
The second pillar is industrial components. Electrical machinery and equipment, dominated by wiring harnesses for European carmakers, made up 14.4% of exports in the seven months, although sales slipped 2.2%. Invest Moldova says harness exports grew from €41mn in 2013 to €269mn in 2025, and that Moldova shipped about €3.4bn of electrical equipment and components to the EU in 2019-2025. Much of the business is contract assembly of imported parts, which the NBS counts as processing re-exports, worth 14.3% of all exports this year. Moldova’s electronics sector, once geared to Soviet defence work, has rebuilt itself around such civilian supply-chain contracts.
The domestic content of exports is rising. Goods made in Moldova grew 15.6% y/y to €1.57bn in January-July, while re-exports of foreign goods fell 1.3% to €401.5mn, cutting their share to 20.4%.
On the services side, computer services exports rose 20.7% to €743mn in 2025, the NBM’s figures show, and the services account ran a surplus of €918mn. Invest Moldova puts total IT exports above €1.05bn, almost eight times the 2015 level, with about 90% of the sector’s output sold abroad. Travel brought in a further €845mn, according to the agency, and education, healthcare and air transport each add a slice. The IT engine has started to sputter at home, with value added in information technology and communications down 7.9% y/y in the second quarter of 2026.
Three times more imports
Imports rose 20.5% to $10.92bn in 2025, nearly three times exports, and the goods trade deficit widened 29.6% to $7.14bn, according to the NBS. Exports covered only 34.6% of imports. The gap has stopped widening so fast this year, with imports up 7.1% to €5.84bn in January-July and the deficit up 4.9% to €3.87bn, but coverage improved only to 33.7%.
Energy is the biggest single drain, with electricity, gas and fuel making up 27% of imports in the first quarter, and remittance-funded household spending pulls in consumer goods. The current-account deficit came to about €3.55bn in 2025 on the NBM’s quarterly data, close to a fifth of GDP, and imports of goods and services ran at 61% of GDP in the fourth quarter against 34% for exports.
Moldova exports relatively few higher value-added manufactured goods, and a single dry summer can wipe out the crop-led gains of a good one, a live risk with the Dniester running at 15% of its average flow. The government is pitching the country to investors as a platform for EU markets and for Ukraine’s reconstruction, and Invest Moldova argues that the country has yet to fully cash in on its trade dependence on the bloc. The pivot west is done. The task now is to make the goods side earn as much as the services side already does.