Panjiva, a leading intelligence platform for global trade professionals, announced Wednesday that it has expanded its inventory of Chinese trade data in order to provide comprehensive insight into trade with the Asian nation.
Data on Chinese trade was made available at Panjiva last year, allowing customers to obtain Chinese import and export data, find previously unknown companies doing business in and with China, and to identify emerging trade trends in China.
Now the inventory of Chinese trade data includes 90 percent of all 6-digit HTS codes for Chinese imports and exports, offers information on more than 375,000 companies, including data on close to 100,000 Chinese companies that are importing goods from outside of the country.
Company CEO Josh Green said, with this data, “U.S. retailers and buyers will now be able to identify a whole new set of suppliers that have been, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Specifically, using all this data, we can now identify Chinese suppliers who have worked with European customers, but never with American customers. There are 75,000 of these companies that most buyers have never heard of!” He added, “Retailers and buyers can now have a comprehensive view of the activities of their current and prospective suppliers in China. Before it was possible to know if your supplier’s business with the U.S. was shrinking, but it was impossible to know if the supplier’s capacity was being redirected to European or Asian customers.”
Despite rising prices in China, Green said demand for data like this is still great, and that Panjiva chose to publish the data now that it has been able to gain adequate access to it, and organize it in a way that made sense for retailers and buyers.
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“Though everyone’s been talking for years about getting out of China, the data shows that China is still a manufacturing juggernaut. Certainly, we’ve seen some diversification, and we’ll see more, but China’s importance as a sourcing destination isn’t going away,” he said.
“China’s emergence as a manufacturing power has helped expand China’s middle class and has made China a top global consumer as well as producer. More companies are selling to China than ever before, and there is more opportunity to supply China than ever before. This makes transparency into the global supply chain critical,” Panjiva noted in a statement.
Transparency is a key trend in trade today, and extensive trade data like this is becoming increasingly relevant to sourcing.
Green said, “What’s most amazing to me is that transparency is actually possible. For so long, global trade has been anything but transparent. But with more and more data becoming available, it’s actually possible to know who’s doing what. For those who are comfortable working with data, this creates opportunity to spot new suppliers or customers, to know what your competitors are up to and to stay on top of trade trends. Over time, our hope is that transparency also increases the level of accountability in global trade.”
Green said Panjiva intends to launch new trade data for other regions and markets in the near future, but would not yet disclose which.