Import and export records for 99 detailed markets and statistical coverage across 200+ countries. Pick a market to see its trade profile, top products and active traders.
Each market page carries what that country reported to the UN: total imports and exports, the partner countries behind them, the breakdown by HS chapter, and the multi-year trend. Those are official aggregates — reconciled, comparable across countries, and completely silent about individual companies. They establish the shape of a market, which is the right first question, and they cannot name a counterparty, which is a different dataset.
The sequence that works on any country page is short. Is the trade in your chapter large enough to matter? Is it growing, flat or shrinking over three years? Which partners dominate it, and how concentrated are they? And is the country a net importer or a net exporter in your category, because that determines whether you are looking at a market or at competition. Four questions, all answerable from the tables, before any commercial research begins.
Markets do not sit in isolation. Regional trade blocs, shared regulatory regimes and common shipping lanes mean that neighbouring countries frequently behave as one commercial problem. A certification valid in one may be recognised in several; a lane serving one usually serves its neighbours; a distributor in one often covers others. Reading a target market alongside its regional peers is normally more useful than reading it alone, which is why every country page links to its siblings.
In categories with strong domestic production, import data measures the gap local supply does not fill. That is useful, but it is a different quantity from market size and should never be presented as one.
Cross-country comparison is where aggregate trade data is most useful and most frequently misused. Three checks make it safe. Confirm both figures are on the same value basis, because exports are normally reported free on board and imports including freight and insurance. Confirm both cover the same period, because reporting years differ and the latest available year is not the same for every market. And compare at the same classification depth, because chapter-level comparison conceals mix differences that can be larger than the gap you are examining.
Goods routed through a major transhipment or re-export hub are frequently attributed to that hub rather than to the country that produced them. That inflates the apparent trade of a handful of economies and deflates the countries behind them, and it is a particularly easy trap when you are trying to identify where a product is actually made. Where a hub economy appears prominently in an origin mix, treat it as a routing signal rather than a production signal until you have checked.
Trade data rewards a short, boring discipline far more than it rewards technique. Four steps cover most of it, and skipping any one of them is where the confident wrong conclusions come from. Fix the classification first, because every filter, every duty figure and every price comparison downstream is keyed to the tariff line and inherits any error in it. Then read at least three years, so that seasonality and trend can be told apart rather than conflated. Then exclude the most recent one or two periods, which are still filling in as late filings arrive. Then separate value from volume, because a value movement can be price, quantity or a change of mix inside the line, and those point in different directions.
| Step | What it prevents | Cost of skipping it |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm the tariff line | Filtering the wrong product | Every downstream figure is wrong by an unknown amount |
| Read three years | Mistaking a season for a trend | Strategy built on a cyclical high or low |
| Drop the incomplete tail | Reading reporting lag as decline | Writing off buyers who never stopped buying |
| Separate value from volume | Reading price as demand | Investing against a movement that was not demand |
| Check the counterparty | Acting on an unverified name | Credit or capacity committed to a company with no history |
| Record the period and source | Unrepeatable analysis | Figures nobody can reconcile three months later |
The material here is one layer of a set that is meant to be used together. The country pages establish the shape of a market from official reported figures. The HS chapter pages take a single classification down to product level. The industry hubs group the chapters that make up a real industry and sum them, because almost no industry is one chapter. The India location pages read the national record as places, using the clearance point as a geographic signal. And the trade role pages take one job at a time — building an importer list, checking an exporter, reading a lane — and set out the signals that matter for it.
Reported totals, partner markets and chapter breakdown for 99 markets.
Learn more ›All 98 chapters, each with the markets that trade it.
Learn more ›Thirty-eight industries, each summed across the chapters it spans.
Learn more ›Seventy-nine trading places, their gateways and their clusters.
Learn more ›The same record read as a buyer list, a supplier check or a lane analysis.
Learn more ›Classification, documentation, pricing, sourcing and compliance in practice.
Learn more ›Customs records cover goods that physically crossed a border and were declared to an authority. They do not cover services. They do not cover domestic trade, so a business selling mainly inside its own market will look far smaller here than it is. They carry no margin, no contract terms, no payment behaviour and no intent. Coverage of counterparty names varies by jurisdiction and is not universal, data arrives on a lag, and published periods are revised as corrections come in.
None of that reduces what the record is good for, and stating it plainly is what makes the rest credible. Used within its limits, customs data is one of the very few commercial sources where the underlying event actually happened, was documented at the time, and was documented under legal obligation rather than for promotional purposes. That is a rare property, and it is worth not overselling.
Before relying on any trade dataset — ours or anyone else's — ask which markets are covered at which depth, what the lag is in each, how company names were matched, and what happens to a historical series across an HS revision. The answers tell you more than any headline figure.
Ninety-nine markets have detailed pages with reported totals, partner tables and chapter breakdowns, within statistical coverage of over 200 countries. Shipment-level depth varies by jurisdiction.
Official statistics reported by each national authority to UN Comtrade. They are country-level aggregates, reconciled across reporters, not shipment records.
A small number of markets have not reported to UN Comtrade for the periods covered. Those pages say so explicitly rather than silently omitting the section.
Coverage of counterparty names varies by jurisdiction. Some administrations publish both parties, some one, and some none — the country page tells you the aggregate picture regardless.
They are annual and follow each authority's reporting cycle, so the latest available year differs between markets. Every table shows the year it covers.