Inside an Import Export Database: What Trade Patterns Can Tell Us

A company buys products from another country. Supplier ships goods to overseas buyer. Business expands its supplier base. A new buyer enters a market. In the long term, these individual actions build familiar patterns with which anyone can work.

An Import Export Database allows that process to be taken in reverse, by uniting a great number of those patterns into a single resource, in order to study commerce from a business-focused viewpoint.

The interest that drives queries against such information is rarely in simply finding the name of a company or the value of a deal.

What proves more valuable is the ability to interpret patterns of repetition, of developing connections and structures that have meaning beyond one transaction.

Trade Data Can Reveal More Than Volume

The instinct when studying trade information tends to be volume: how much activity takes place, what the value of that activity might be.

Those are excellent starting points, but they can tell only part of the story.

The same "value" might mask significantly divergent structures between markets: one featuring a few major players, another with numerous contributors at varying levels.

A high rate of shipments is not inherently more valuable than a low rate of shipments.

Patterns of participation shape the fundamental makeup of a market.

Looking beyond raw numbers to see what kinds of businesses take part, what products appear, how consistently certain structures emerge, and what geographies enable them all can be much more valuable than an examination of an aggregate.

Look for Concentration

One particularly valuable pattern to examine is concentration: the appearance of a consistent set of participants within a body of recorded trade data.

Suppose, for instance, that you were researching a particular product and found that the majority of available trade data featured only a handful of suppliers.

That could prove an important discovery.

Not only does it demonstrate that the market for that product is likely concentrated, it also provides an immediate point of entry for any business wishing to research that market further.

Now, by contrast, suppose that the same product appeared in data that did not feature any concentration of participants or destinations.

That suggests a significantly different starting point.

An Import Export Database gives businesses the opportunity to explore those differences, rather than making assumptions based on general knowledge of any given product category.

It doesn't answer immediately why a pattern of concentration might appear, only that it does appear.

It is worth following that lead.

Supplier Diversity Can Be an Important Signal

Businesses acquire products regularly, and international commerce enables companies to obtain goods from any number of locations - from countries, from markets, from individuals.

When analyzing trade data to gain insight into supplier diversity, a business might well find that some consistencies appear throughout multiple records of an individual product, or disappear entirely.

Some companies might consistently appear to have sourced a product from the same country of origin, while others might span multiple nations in their recorded procurement history.

Neither outcome is inherently more desirable than the other, but both can be commercially significant.

A business wishing to research an international supply chain might want to know whether a particular product tends to originate in one market or whether procurement efforts tend to be more distributed.

That observation can be crucial in analyzing international supply chains.

Follow the Changes, Not Just the Current Picture

A snapshot is often valuable, but identifying change can be more interesting.

Let's say that a certain product tends to appear in only a few countries of origin or destination.

Then, suddenly, those markets change.

New nations appear in the mix: this could indicate expansion, diversification, or even the appearance of new players in international commerce altogether.

There could also be other reasons to pay attention to these changes in recorded trade data.

History is an extremely valuable resource in identifying these shifts, because it allows a business to determine how these changes take place over time, rather than seeing only an instantaneous state of affairs.

New Market Connections Can Be Worth Watching

Sometimes, the most interesting pattern is not a large increase, but something new.

A product that never previously appeared between two nations in trade records suddenly appears between them.

Activity that previously took place between one company and one market now appears to span multiple markets, and multiple companies.

Changes like these can be easy to overlook when examining large bodies of national-level statistics.

A more detailed Import Export Database offers another option for identifying these opportunities, if one's coverage extends to the level of individual entities.

For businesses engaged in market research in particular, these shifts can represent starting points for further study.

They are not, by themselves, conclusive evidence of an opportunity.

Still, they are valuable signals.

Recurring Activity Can Tell Its Own Story

Repetition is another valuable pattern to examine.

As with any isolated transaction, an appearance in a trade database might not prove significant.

With repetition, then, you begin to see a larger trend.

If a particular company appears consistently in information relating to one product category, geography, or trade relationship, that can be significantly more valuable than an isolated instance of activity.

The pattern can be similar with destinations: if a product tends to appear in a specific region or set of nations in repeated transactions, that helps confirm that a relationship does indeed exist, rather than an isolated instance of activity within a much broader body of available data.

Once again, then, repetition can help to highlight a signal, but signals are not the same thing as confirmation.

Before a business takes any action based on a pattern like this, it will still need to perform due diligence to make sure that it understands the overall state of an identified market.

Gaps Can Be Interesting Too

One of the easiest mistakes to make when researching trade data is assuming that absence equals insignificance.

Sometimes you need to study the gaps as much as the entries.

A researcher, for instance, might notice that a product tends to appear across a number of different countries and markets, but never in one specific location.

In that case, an additional examination of that location might prove valuable.

Is the market genuinely absent? Are there alternative structures for sourcing? Might there be other logistical or regulatory challenges?

Does the trade data extend to that market at all?

Any of these could be valuable subjects for additional research.

This is why researchers who work with physical evidence often find that simply tallying up numerical statistics cannot be sufficient: there is always the need to understand why one market might differ from another.

Compare Markets on More Than One Dimension

Selecting a market for further study should not be based on the presence of a single value or characteristic.

Instead, comparative analysis across multiple dimensions can be an extremely valuable approach.

In practice, that might mean analyzing the number of entities as well as the overall value of the recorded transactions.

It might mean examining changes over time as well as differences between categories or other markets.

One market might have a significantly greater value per transaction, but fewer participants: another might have lower value, but greater diversity of suppliers or buyers.

A third might have comparatively lower value and fewer participants as of the most recent moment in the data, but have grown substantially when examined across longer time frames.

All of these are extremely different kinds of markets with very different kinds of commercial opportunities.

An Import Export Database can help facilitate that understanding if the necessary data is available from the beginning.

Trade Patterns Can Help With Competitor Research

International trade information offers another advantage as well: a researcher might not only be able to examine the activities of a competitor, but to do so in significantly greater detail than an analysis of a company website or industry directory could provide.

A researcher looking into a competitor, then, might be interested in the kinds of products they tend to receive or ship, their trading partners, any recurrent patterns of those partners, and the evolution of that information over time.

That can be tremendously valuable intelligence, but it is only part of the research picture, because a competitor is always more than the sum of their recorded transactions.

Suppliers or buyers identified in a database record will always be only one element of the larger due diligence picture: that research still needs to take place before any commercial decisions can be made.

Patterns Can Support Sourcing Research

Another field in which trade patterns can be valuable is in sourcing.

Companies interested in identifying potential overseas partners might want to select a product category, and then analyze which businesses tend to appear and which destinations are related.

This is, in effect, an inversion of the normal sourcing research path, which moves from a supplier to products.

That shift can be extremely valuable, though, because it opens up a much broader range of potential partners to examine.

The sheer amount of data becomes an opportunity, rather than a challenge.

Data does not select a winner; it merely illuminates one possibility among many.

The Importance of Comparing Similar Periods

When comparing trade data across time, the value comes in consistency.

A comparison of a single month of activity to another month at a significantly different point in the year is often not going to be particularly useful, because other variables may interfere with the results.

The same principle applies to other dimensions: if you have data covering only a portion of an available range, your conclusions might be misleading.

That is why it is crucial for an analyst to consider the time period under analysis and the consistency of the underlying data.

It is especially important to take into account the strength of a pattern across multiple points, rather than focusing on one isolated instance.

Exim Trade Data and Trade Research

Exim Trade Data can be utilized as a research tool by any business that wishes to analyze international trade activity by category, by participant, by country, and by overall volume of transaction information.

The starting point for that research can be varied, depending on the business's interests: a sourcing specialist might begin with a product, a market researcher with a nation, and a business analyst with a company name.

An exporter might be considering destinations associated with any given category of goods.

It does not matter what the initial impetus for research has been, though: what matters most is connecting the dots between available pieces of information, and using them to illuminate some aspect of a particular business concern.

Rather than working on scattered data points, a business has a research path it can follow to gain a clearer understanding of an identified market.

Data Can Point to Questions, Not Just Answers

Perhaps the most important use of an Import Export Database is as a tool for asking questions.

A sudden shift in activity might prompt one to investigate why that shift has occurred.

A persistent supplier might prompt investigation into why that relationship continues to take place.

A new destination might prompt further analysis of its peculiarities.

A concentrated product category can begin a line of inquiry into what those companies have in common, and what that might suggest about the available trade opportunities.

These are all questions worth asking, and the best kind of trade research will pursue those lines of inquiry.

Turning Patterns Into Business Research

Trade patterns are only valuable insofar as they relate to a business's needs.

If a business has a commercial objective, the patterns can support its pursuit: market expansion efforts might focus on expanding into changing destinations.

Sourcing efforts might analyze supplier relationships.

Competitor analysis might shift toward the interplay between companies and products.

Analysis of products might compare countries and change over time, if the researcher is in a category in which that might be applicable.

The same database can support extremely different kinds of research efforts with extremely different kinds of commercial objectives.

The difference comes in the starting point and the questions.

Final Thoughts

An Import Export Database is not merely a resource for retrieving trade data.

It is also a tool for investigating the details of that data, to get a better sense of how products move around the world, how companies work within markets, and the ways in which those markets shape the commercial opportunities available to a business.

The patterns that emerge are most interesting, and lead to the best opportunities, though: a concentration of companies, a reemergence of suppliers, a sudden change in destination activity, a product category that begins to change, a market that appears to be anomalous, or any other pattern that seems to have significance.

None of these is an answer or a conclusion, by themselves.

Any can guide further research when examined with due diligence, after appropriate consideration has been given to its implications.