For Indian exporters, the next big opportunity may not lie in the traditional markets of the US and Europe; it may lie in the countries that, like India, are themselves part of the Global South. This is one of the clearest inferences from the recent surge in trade between these countries. The South-South merchandise trade—especially between developing economies—reached $7.2 trillion in 2025, up 17.2% from 2024 and more than 14 times from around $500 billion in 1995, according to UNCTAD. In fact, the share of South-South trade in 2025 in global merchandise trade increased to 28% from 11% in 2020. These numbers highlight the growing significance of the Global South in world commerce.
The shift, experts point out, is particularly significant because these developing countries are no longer simply exporting finished goods to rich economies; they are increasingly supplying industrial components, intermediate goods, and key raw materials and inputs to one another, creating production networks that cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
For India, a country with well-established trade flows with traditional markets, this growing trend creates a potentially significant new export opportunity. But the rapid growth of South-South trade does not automatically mean that the world’s sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP (gross domestic product) will capture a larger share of it. Experts say doing so will require a change in strategy, one that goes beyond simply increasing exports to building deeper commercial and production links across the Global South. With India set to host the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13, 2026, the timing could not be more ideal.
South-South trade is becoming a structural shift
“Faster growth in developing economies and a shift in the underlying trade architecture are both at play, but the weight of evidence points to a structural shift,” says Sachin Chaturvedi, Vice-Chancellor of Nalanda University and former director-general of the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a New Delhi-based think tank focused on issues, including South-South cooperation and global trade.
He says the South-South trade expansion to more than $7 trillion today is partly a ‘scale effect’, but the underlying trade architecture has also genuinely changed.
