Armenia: why $13 billion of imports is not the size of the market

Most of those imports were gold that never stayed in the country.

Now the composition. Finport, citing the Statistical Committee, tracked the trade year by year, and you can watch a market stop being itself.

The metal did not stay. Eurasianet, citing Arminfo, showed the mechanics in June 2025 with one pair of numbers: $7.4 billion imported against roughly $8 billion exported. Finport puts the export side at $8.04 billion off the same statistics. The margin is too thin for anything to have been made in between. Russian gold and stones moved on to the UAE and Hong Kong, and Armenia was a stretch of road.

Then the road closed. Over January to April 2025 those imports came to $740 million, and total trade turnover fell 53%.

Your sum breaks in the numerator: much of that money was never goods for an Armenian buyer. The ceiling on demand here is read off your own product group in the customs data, not off the annual total.

That also flips the sign on the scary number. A market that fell 29% in a year may not have moved at all in your category, because your category is not what fell.

Armenia has been in the Eurasian Economic Union since 2 January 2015. An EAC certificate or declaration obtained for Kazakhstan is valid here, as it is across all five member states, according to certification firms such as Schmidt & Schmidt. You will not budget for a second certification.

The road is the harder part. Armenia shares no land border with any member of the union: its neighbours are Georgia, Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan. Anything moving between Yerevan and the rest of the EAEU crosses non-member territory or flies. A distributor who serves Bishkek from Almaty will not serve Yerevan from there, and that gets settled before the territory clause is signed.

On six of the markets we have figures for, Instagram outreaches Facebook, usually by a wide margin. Armenia breaks the pattern.

DataReportal's report of 8 November 2025 counts 2.36 million internet users, 80.0% of the population, and 1.65 million social media user identities. Carry over a media plan written for Kazakhstan and the money lands on the platform with the smaller audience here. Telegram is absent from the report; the platform publishes no figures of its own.

The folder of Russian-language material you put together for Kazakhstan gets opened and read here; negotiations with Armenian companies have run in Russian for us. Armenian comes in once the product reaches the shelf and the end buyer, and that is a full translation rather than an edit. Whether a market this size warrants a site of its own is a question we took apart in the Journal.

The first thing we do on Armenia is recalculate demand off your product group instead of the annual total. Then comes the list of companies already bringing that group in, and correspondence with them in Russian.

We scope Armenia as a project of its own rather than an add-on to the Kazakh one: the certificate carries over from there, the route and the timings do not.

By the end of the first month the sum you started with is run on the right numerator: not $13.03 billion across everyone, but your product group and the companies that bring it in.