The numbers come from Tajikistan’s statistics agency, reported by Avesta. Trade with Switzerland passed $1.013 billion in five months of 2026. For comparison, the whole of 2025 brought about $386 million, itself roughly half the 2024 level. The flow to the refineries existed before; what is new is its scale, after a year in which it had thinned.
The partner rankings shifted with it. Kazakhstan held third place across the full year 2025 with $1.19 billion; over January-May 2026 it recorded about $649 million and slipped to fourth, a change in rank driven by Switzerland’s surge rather than a collapse in Kazakh trade. Only China and Russia now sit ahead of Bern.
Switzerland is the world’s refining hub for gold, and historically bullion has dominated Tajik shipments there. When a metals-exporting country sends over a third of its exports to that hub at record world prices, the plainest reading is gold moving to the refineries. The statistics agency lists mineral products and base metals among the top export lines, and Times of Central Asia draws the same conclusion: precious metals and commodity-linked flows are behind the jump.
When over a third of a country’s exports go to the world’s gold refining hub, the trade map is really a map of the gold price.
Total trade tells the same story. Tajikistan’s turnover rose 48.5% year on year to $5.7 billion, with imports near $4.37 billion against $1.4 billion of exports. The trade gap is wide and structural: remittances and metal sales bridge it, and gold at record prices is doing more of that bridging than ever.
The pattern matters for the budget. Gold converts into hard currency the state can spend at a moment when Dushanbe is financing Rogun and servicing debt. It also concentrates risk: an export base that leans this hard on one metal, priced in a market Dushanbe does not control, is a windfall on the way up and a hole on the way down.
What to watch: how much of the flow runs through the National Bank and shows up in budget revenue, and whether the export share keeps climbing through the second half. A single buyer taking over a third of exports is a dependency, even when the buyer is Switzerland.