Sri Lanka has imported more than 800,000 vehicles worth around US$3.8 billion since import restrictions were lifted in 2024, Deputy Minister of Economic Development Nishantha Jayaweera told Parliament on Tuesday, rejecting opposition claims that the purchases had run down the country’s foreign reserves.
Letters of credit worth US$1.9 billion were opened across 2024 and 2025, and a further US$1.69 billion has been opened in 2026, the Daily Mirror reported.
The breakdown
The deputy minister gave Parliament figures for two years. So far in 2026, Sri Lanka has imported more than 79,000 cars, 12,000 commercial vehicles, 3,148 buses and vans, 317,000 motorcycles and 40,000 three-wheelers.
In 2025 the comparable figures were more than 90,000 cars, 11,000 commercial vehicles, 2,185 buses and vans, 225,000 motorcycles and 22,000 three-wheelers.
Those two years sum to roughly 801,000 units, consistent with the “more than 800,000” headline figure. The composition is worth noting: two-wheelers and three-wheelers account for around three-quarters of the total unit count, while cars — the category that dominates the public argument about import spending — make up rather less than a quarter.
The reserves argument
Jayaweera was responding to opposition claims that vehicle imports had caused foreign reserves to fall. He said the government currently holds reserves of around US$6.9 billion despite the expenditure on vehicles, and expects to raise them to US$8 billion by the end of this year.
The US$6.9 billion figure is consistent with the level reported in Sri Lanka’s recent external-sector coverage, including the Central Bank’s dollar purchases in September, where reserves including the swap facility with the People’s Bank of China were put at the same level.
One figure does not reconcile cleanly
The letters of credit cited — US$1.9 billion for 2024 and 2025, plus US$1.69 billion for 2026 — total about US$3.59 billion, against the US$3.8 billion of imports in the headline figure. The two measure different things: a letter of credit is a financing instrument opened at the point of order, while the import value is realised on arrival, and the two will not align within a single calendar period. The reporting does not explain the gap, and readers should not treat the two numbers as alternative statements of the same quantity.
A second caution concerns the headline itself. The Daily Mirror initially published this story under a headline reading “over 8,000 vehicles” — a hundredfold understatement — before re-filing it with the corrected figure. The corrected version is the one cited here.
Not reported
The filing does not give a figure for 2024, the year restrictions were lifted, even though the headline total is measured from that point — so the unit breakdown covers only part of the period it describes. There is no breakdown of the US$3.8 billion by vehicle category, no figure for the tax revenue collected on these imports, and no statement of the monthly import bill or its recent direction. The opposition members who raised the reserves claim are not named, and their specific argument is not set out. Nothing is reported on whether the government intends to alter the current import regime, or on what the US$8 billion reserve target assumes about the remainder of the year.
