Germany-UK Business-Government Forum in Berlin

Berlin (dpa) – A good six years after Brexit, Germany and the United Kingdom are forging increasingly close ties. The next steps are to be announced at today’s Germany-UK Business-Government Forum in Berlin. 

After leaving the EU in 2020, the United Kingdom had for a time dropped out of Germany’s top ten trading partners in 2022. With a trading volume of 118.4 billion euros, the UK did at least regain ninth place in this list in 2025 - though it had permanently been among the top five pre-Brexit. For the United Kingdom, Germany is its number three trading partner after the USA and China, according to the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK).

Several German firms from the defence industry have recently established operations in the UK. According to Germany Trade and Invest (GTAI), Rheinmetall is producing, among other things, 623 armoured transport vehicles for the British Army; German start-ups have also crossed the Channel to produce drones there.

As far as German exports are concerned, cars are a guarantee of success in the UK. “New car registrations in the UK climbed by 3.5 percent to over two million passenger cars in 2025,” the expert Marc Lehnfeld from GTAI told the dpa. “German car exports increased during the same period by over 12 percent to 15.8 billion euros. Germany’s most important export to the UK now accounts for one in five euros generated by German exports there.”