From Zurich-West to the World: How One Trading House Is Rewriting Swiss Export Strategy

Sandra Küng launched Meridian Trade Partners out of a shared office on Hardturmstrasse in Zurich-West in March 2021 with four employees and a single trade corridor connecting Swiss precision-instrument manufacturers to buyers in Southeast Asia. Today the firm employs 34 people across three continents and cleared CHF 112 million in transaction volume last year. She is 38.

The timing of Meridian's rise matters. Global trade routes are fracturing under the weight of geopolitical pressure — the slow bleed of the Ukraine conflict, energy shortfalls now visibly straining Russian domestic supply chains, and Iran entering a period of deep institutional uncertainty following the death of its Supreme Leader this week. Western companies are scrambling to map which markets remain accessible and which have quietly closed. Küng spent 2022 and 2023 doing exactly that analysis while competitors sat still.

Building Corridors Where Others See Walls

Meridian's core thesis is straightforward: Swiss manufacturing quality commands a premium in markets that larger multinationals have abandoned as too complicated. The firm operates what Küng calls a "corridor model" — pairing a Swiss exporter with a locally embedded partner in the destination market rather than relying on remote distribution. Current active corridors include Vietnam, Indonesia, Morocco, and Colombia. A fifth corridor targeting West Africa was pushed back six months after flooding in Côte d'Ivoire disrupted the region's logistics infrastructure in late June.

The operational base remains decidedly Zurich. The firm's trading desk sits in a converted industrial building on Hardturmstrasse, a short walk from the Schiffbau cultural complex that has come to define Zurich-West's shift from manufacturing district to knowledge-economy hub. Back-office compliance and finance functions are handled from Zurich's Leutschenbach neighbourhood, near the SRF broadcasting campus. Küng deliberately chose both locations for their transport links to Zurich Airport — the firm moves physical samples and product documentation regularly, and proximity to Terminal 2's cargo facilities matters operationally.

Meridian is registered with Switzerland Global Enterprise, the federally backed export promotion body headquartered in Zurich at Stampfenbachstrasse 85, and has completed two cohorts of the agency's Export Accelerator programme. The programme, which costs participating SMEs between CHF 4,000 and CHF 12,000 depending on track, provides market-entry coaching and introductions to Swiss diplomatic trade networks. Küng credits the Morocco corridor directly to an introduction made at an SGE-sponsored event in Basel in November 2024.

The Numbers Underneath the Growth

Switzerland's overall goods exports reached CHF 266 billion in 2025, according to the Federal Customs and Border Security Office — a 3.1 percent increase on 2024, driven primarily by pharmaceuticals and watches. But mid-size trading intermediaries like Meridian occupy a different slice of the market: firms with between CHF 50 million and CHF 250 million in annual transaction volume, a segment that Swiss Trade and Investment Promotion estimated at roughly 340 active companies as of its most recent survey, published in January 2026.

Küng's differentiation within that segment is geographic concentration in markets with limited Swiss banking relationships. Because standard Swiss correspondent banking often excludes smaller Southeast Asian and African counterparties, Meridian built a payment-processing arrangement through a Singaporean fintech partner licensed under the Monetary Authority of Singapore's Major Payment Institution framework. That infrastructure, operational since September 2023, reduced average transaction settlement time from 14 days to under four days for the Vietnam corridor.

The practical lesson for Zurich-based SMEs watching Meridian is not to copy the model wholesale but to note where the friction points are. Swiss export infrastructure is strong for large firms and near-zero for one-person consultancies. The middle layer — companies turning over CHF 5 million to CHF 50 million annually with genuine international ambitions — often lacks both the bandwidth to navigate compliance alone and the revenues to hire a dedicated trade-finance team. That gap is where Meridian found its first clients, and where Küng says demand is still growing. Her firm is currently in early discussions with Switzerland Global Enterprise about a possible co-sponsored mentorship programme targeting exactly that tier, with a pilot potentially launching in the first quarter of 2027.