GRAPPLING with US and EU sanctions that have become progressively tougher over the past 18 months, Iran is increasingly turning to Asia in particular to China, now its top trading partner.

"Our exchanges with Europe, which used to account for 90 per cent of our trade, now represent only 23 to 24 billion of our 200 billion dollars in trade," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said after the EU ratcheted up sanctions on Iran in January.

These sanctions, which aim to pressure Tehran to halt its nuclear activities, "have not shrunk the world for us", he said.

Iran is expected to have exported US$100 billion worth of oil and US$45 billion of non-oil products over its calendar year, which ends mid-March. Its total imports over the same period will touch around US$55 billion, according to official forecasts.

"The sanctions, like those previously, will let us cut all economic links with the West," the number two officer in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, General Hossein Salami, said last month. The force is one of the primary targets of the sanctions.

The European Union, which is imposing a boycott of Iranian oil, had been its second biggest importer after China, accounting for around 20 per cent of the crude the Islamic republic sells abroad.

Iran exports more than 70 per cent of its oil to Asian markets, in particular China, India, Japan and South Korea.

China and India alone buy 40 per cent of Iranian oil exports. They are resisting the Western sanctions, saying they will observe only UN measures, not unilateral ones.

Iran-China trade jumped more than 50 per cent between 2010 and 2011, to US$45 billion. The two countries plan for it to grow further, to US$100 billion by 2015.

Exchanges with South Korea grew 61 per cent in 2011, to $18.5 billion.

However trade with the United Arab Emirates, a traditional partner that lies just across the Gulf and which has long been a re-exporting hub for European, US and Asian goods to Iran, has slipped as US financial sanctions bite. UAE imports now represent only a third of Iranian imports.AFP