At the end of the transition period for the UK leaving the EU single market in January 2021, a few Italian companies were not prepared. A couple wrote panicked emails to the Italian trade agency asking if Brexit meant they could no longer export to the UK, or if they had to start paying tariffs on their exports . To their relief, the answer to both questions was no.

“I told them that, if it had been like this, we would have been in the middle of a trade war with the UK,” said Gabriella Migliore, who runs a Brexit support service at the Italian Agency. commerce, or Agenzia ICE, Speaking during a conference This year.

Instead, thanks to a last-minute trade deal between the EU and the UK negotiated in December 2020, duty-free trade continued. Nonetheless, Italian exports to the UK have been hit – down sharply last year with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and are now recovering at a slower pace than in other key markets.

SACE, the Italian export credit agency, expects 5.3 percent growth of Italian exports to the United Kingdom in 2021, but does not anticipate a return to pre-Covid levels before 2023. On the other hand, he predicts that the gap will be closed this year with Germany, France, the States United and Japan, with double-digit increases in exports to their markets.

So, is UK trade falling behind because of Brexit? “It’s a bit premature to draw any conclusions. . . but that can be a good clue, ”says Fabrizio Botti, an expert in international economics at the IAI think tank in Rome.

In the first seven months of 2021, the UK was the sixth largest market for “Made in Italy” products and represented Italy’s third largest trade surplus after the United States and Switzerland. Typical Italian exports to Great Britain – which peaked at over 25 billion euros in 2019 – include machinery, cars and auto parts, pharmaceuticals, clothing, furniture, food, wine, clothing and fashion.

However, Brexit introduced significant administrative burdens for Italian exporters, with red tape and confusion over regulatory changes. This includes the UKCA product safety mark for goods and services, introduced to replace the old CE mark in 2021. Mandatory use of the mark has now been largely postponed to 2023.

Despite this, there is broad optimism – or, at least, hope – among Italian business leaders and policymakers that the UK will remain an important trading partner in the future.

“Our paper production has increased,” says Annibale Pancrazio, the third generation boss of Pancrazio, a family business that has long exported canned food to the UK. “It’s really a nuisance,” he says, noting that dealing with it “can sometimes require staff to stay late into the evening.” But Pancrazio, based near the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy, doesn’t see Brexit as an insurmountable obstacle.

“The British remain an attractive market. . . they can cook tomato sauce worse than us, but we don’t care as long as they keep buying it from us, ”he says.

Food exporters are among those who have done reasonably well in the UK market, in part thanks to panic shopping in supermarkets during the pandemic.

SACE says it is the only export sector that continued to grow until 2020 – and it is expected to continue to grow, at a rate of 2-3% over the next two years.

In contrast, sales of motor vehicles and machinery have been the category most affected by the Covid pandemic and are struggling to regain ground, according to the agency.

For Francesco Padovan, export manager for Coster Group, a Milanese supplier of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems with a branch in the English East Midlands, Brexit was “essentially a bureaucratic and logistical challenge”. But the company has worked hard to prepare for it and will continue to invest in Britain.

“Delivery times have almost doubled and the cost is also very different,” he says. Yet “the UK is and will remain one of our main targets”, with specific market products in the works. Padovan says his company plans to increase its workforce in the UK. “We see the glass half full and not half empty,” he says.

Brits can cook tomato sauce worse than us, but we don’t care as long as they keep buying it from us

Nicola Piovesana, an export manager who works for Serena Wines, one of the main producers of Prosecco, agrees. “Our biggest problem so far has been Covid rather than Brexit,” he says. The company lost three months of business in early 2021 due to lockdowns in the UK. “Once the country reopened, our sales were very, very strong. . . in terms of volumes, we are absolutely satisfied.

Serena primarily supplies the hospitality industry and hopes to return to pre-Covid UK sales levels by the end of the year. But looking to the future, Piovesana is less hot: he says the truck driver shortage affecting the UK economy “is starting to become a huge problem” that could make it “a less interesting country”.

For some, the question is whether there could ever be a return to Brexit. “For now it’s done, but maybe that will change in a generation or two,” said Massimo Ungaro, a London-based lawmaker for the ruling Democratic Party in Italy, which represents Italians living in abroad. “Besides, they [the Brits] have yet to see its true cost.