Marketing research using Trade Map portal. Practical aspects

The Belarusian Chamber of Commerce and Industry receives numerous requests from Belarusian business entities to search for potential partners abroad. Having analyzed these requests, we would like to draw the attention of specialists of foreign economic services of Belarusian enterprises to some Internet resources specially created by international organizations to explain emerging issues about international trade and facilitate conducting strategic marketing research.

Information portal Trade Map (http://www.trademap.org) is one of the modern tools that allow any Belarusian business entity to independently organize a search for information on foreign trade statistics and foreign companies. This portal was created in 2001 by the International Trade Center to assist the organizations contributing to the development of foreign trade relations.

The International Trade Center (ITC, http://www.intracen.org) has been operating since 1964 in the UN system to provide technical assistance in the field of trade. ITC works closely with the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD – research and policy issues) and the World Trade Organization (trade rules).

According to the ITC's policy, registered Belarusian visitors of the portal have full and free access to Trade Map resources (unregistered visitors get limited access to information).

Information for Trade Map is provided mainly by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) within the UN COMTRADE project, where annual trade datasets are presented at the level of 2-, 4- or 6-digit goods codes according to the classification of the Harmonized System. To get more detailed information, ITC also collects data directly from the national organizations responsible for collecting and processing statistics in their countries (customs, trade ministries, statistical offices, etc.).

Currently, the Trade Map portal database provides extensive information on the annual data of foreign trade of more than 150 countries of the world and on the quarterly or monthly data of more than 100 countries.

Foreign trade statistics on the portal is presented in tables with options to sort data by countries, goods and directions of movement of goods (export, import, re-export). Besides, it is possible to use built-in visualization tools for the same information in the form of graphs, diagrams and even world maps showing the leading trading partners for a particular product.

Statistical information in retrospect up to 20 years is available for download in various formats (Word, Excel, text format), which allows organizing its further processing directly for the needs of the study. Besides, registered users have the opportunity to create their own groups of goods or countries to extract and track the necessary information from the massive data set.

The accumulated volume of information on many countries which carefully maintain their national statistics and openly provide it to the world community, allows this resource to implement an interesting mechanism for identifying trade flows for those countries where there are difficulties in collecting statistics, or where statistics are provided irregularly or partially (for example, Chad, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Cuba). We are talking about the method of "mirror" statistics.

By comparing official statistical information on mutual trade of countries of the world, the method of "mirror" statistics makes it possible to reveal the approximate volumes of exports or imports for individual goods to one specific country that participates in international trade but does not report on it. The more countries of the world improve their methods of collecting and processing information and provide this information in a single database, the more accurately it is possible to determine the volume of trade flows that exist with the "closed" countries. Of course, when using this method, it should be taken into account that official statistics rarely coincide with "mirror" statistics for several reasons. These reasons can be methodological (countries may use different standards and rules of accounting for trade transactions), technical (conversion of transaction currencies to compare cost indicators) and others (deliberate distortion of data, translation mistakes etc.). However, "mirror" statistics allows us to make at least preliminary conclusions about the volume of commodity flows and their dynamics in the absence of official information.

In some cases, the method of "mirror" statistics makes it possible to identify signs of grey market activity, especially when, for example, the export of a product from one country (according to its official data) and import of the same product from all of its trading partners (according to their official import statistics) differ by tens or hundreds of times. In such a case, it's recommended to use a set of other tools that can provide additional information (sample surveys of households, reports of producers and consumers, analysis of administrative information, analysis of information from cargo carriers and retail chains, results of the examination of individuals at road checkpoints on the border, analysis of news reports etc.).

Concerning specific business interests, the Trade Map portal uses data on the volume of foreign trade and goods codes to provide information about companies that produce goods or are engaged in the export/import of such goods. Nowadays, the portal informs about companies from more than 133 countries (including from Belarus).

The following data is indicated in the company card on Trade Map portal: company's location (country, city), contact information (website, phone number, fax number, executive full name), additional information (turnover, number of employees), information about the products the company works with (the names of goods are listed in tabular form and in some cases with notes on how the company works with them: D – distributor, P – producer, S – services supplier, I – import, E – export).

The peculiarity of the company search function on Trade Map portal is the usage of mainly two sources of information. The first source is the Kompass International database (https://www.kompass.com/, contains records of more than 36 million companies from 75 countries of the world). The second source is the Dun & Bradstreet database (https://www.dnb.com/, one of the world's largest registries of information (over 200 million records) about private companies from different countries). According to Trade Map approaches, a company cannot directly provide information about itself to the portal. But the method of information presentation on Trade Map is currently developing to significantly increase the number of companies while improving the quality of the information provided about them.