How to choose foreign trade products with market?

When foreign trade friends consider what foreign trade products the company does, and analyze the market and trade data of the products, we can use the following statistical data to do a numerical comparison and market analysis. First, search in Google and enter the official website of UN Comtrade Database.



Enter Get Data, we can see that there is a series of data forms that can be checked. Let's take a look.



Product Category
The default is the commodity trade, which does not need to be moved.

Standards for commodity classification
There are three classification standards: HS, SITC, and BEC. HS is a well-known standard for the classification of commodities. The second one is SITC, which is a standard international trade classification and another rule for the classification of commodities. In fact, the latter two are not used much, so choose the default HS code. Below the HS code, there are a lot of options for versions and years. This is because of the different classification methods of HS codes, some revisions will be made every few years, we do not need to choose which version of the year according to the specific age, here to keep the default as reported.

Select the required data
Let's take a commodity as an example, such as 940540 LED light, to find out China's export situation in the past 5 years.
1. Periods (year) select the complete annual report data submitted by the trading country, (multiple choices), and take a look at the trade situation in the past few years;
2. Choose China in Reporters;
3. Choose the default World in Partners;
4. choose the type of data to view in Trade flows.



After the selection here, let's have a look. The content of the inquiry is the trade statistics of China's exports of LED light and other products to the world in the past five years.

HS coded product number
Which refers to the product number and corresponding category. TOTAL represents all commodities, that is to say, if we want to look at China's total export volume of China's exports to the world in 2017, then we will keep the default TOTAL. If not, we can fill in the 6-digit HS code of the product we want to find. Here, the products are divided into the corresponding commodity coding categories in a hierarchical manner.

 For example, LED light products, we first input the level of 94, after input we can see the corresponding code and product description in the drop-down menu. Because the level 94 is a large chapter category, all the following categories are about electromechanical products.



 For specific LED products, we continue to input to refine its classification, enter 9405, and get a code very close to LED light.



We continue to input 940540 to get an accurate 6-digit coded product classification number.



One thing to note here is that only global commodity codes are supported here, that is, universal 6-bit HS codes, so using Chinese 8-bit codes does not support querying. Click download CSV to download the search results, we can get a table like this.



In the table, we mainly look at two aspects, one is the total export volume, and the other is the net weight. Let us look at the trend of the data in recent years. We can see that in the past few years, the export volume and net weight of products such as LED light have kept increasing year by year. What is this indicating? The demand for electromechanical products like LED light has continued to grow in recent years. We can preliminarily judge that the demand for the LED light product is relatively large, and the annual export volume is increasing year by year. Therefore, when choosing what products to compare and make for the company, we could have a mentality.

From this point of view, if the export value and export volume of a product are increasing year by year, it shows that this kind of product has a great market and development potential. On the contrary, if the demand for this type of products, the amounts of purchases from China, etc. are all declining, then the future development trend of such products may have to be considered.