What’s really got leprechauns leaping, however, is the rise of Jameson shipments: With 69 shipments of the whiskey coming in from December through February, this year marks an increase of a remarkable 430 percent from 2012, and a whopping 6800 percent from 2011.
While the reasons for the jump may remain unclear, it’s certain that this March 17th will be a merry one. Cheers!
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We’ve been rather outspoken at Panjiva that manufacturing is gradually transitioning away from China. In addition to moving to other Asian countries, it will also be moving to Latin America. For North American buyers in particular, Latin America is a viable option: buyers can source closer to home, the logistics are simpler, and much of the infrastructure and expertise is already in place. In fact, according to an HSBC analysis, U.S. imports from Mexico may soon exceed U.S. imports from China.
To support this shift in global trade, we’re proud to announce that we’ve added Latin America to Panjiva’s comprehensive customs data package.
This means access to a wealth of information—more than 60 million records—that will help buyers determine if Latin America may be a good sourcing destination for their business. Through Panjiva’s existing, intuitive search platform, customers can find the names of companies that are importing and exporting, product details, FOB values, and HS codes of products. The records cover ocean freight trade data as well as air and truck shipments dating back to 2007.
We are constantly on the hunt for new data that will help make global trade more efficient and more transparent. Last month, we announced a partnership with ThomasNet that finally put American manufacturers on Panjiva. Today, we add Latin American trade data for Chile, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay (with more Latin American countries coming soon). But we’re not stopping there. We’re working on the latest—and arguably greatest—data set now that we’ll be unveiling right here in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned!
]]>The Great News for Buyers — and American Suppliers
ThomasNet, built on the foundation of Thomas Register, is industry’s platform for supplier discovery and sourcing of components, equipment, MRO products, raw materials and custom manufacturing services from suppliers in North America. Now we are working with ThomasNet to make suppliers on their platform available to buyers searching on Panjiva. Head over to Global Search and give it a try. Whether you’re searching for linear actuators, cranes, frp products pumps, valves or anything in between on Panjiva, you’ll see American suppliers (and some Canadian ones too) from ThomasNet in the search results mix. And, if you want to focus your Panjiva searches exclusively on American suppliers, you can do that too. That’s the great news for buyers.
Of course, this is also great news for American suppliers. American suppliers now have the opportunity to get in front of Panjiva’s 5,000 paying users, as well as the 1 million people who hit the free portion of our site each month. Did you know that 70% of Panjiva’s traffic comes from outside the United States? As a result of our partnership with ThomasNet, American suppliers are going to have an opportunity to get in front of buyers from all around the world. That’s the great news for American suppliers.
The Bigger Picture
We’ve all heard the speculation that American buyers are thinking hard about manufacturing closer to home. Certainly, some of Panjiva’s American buyers will now find it easier to find these closer-to-home suppliers. However, what we’re even more excited about is connecting American suppliers with overseas buyers. We believe that the future of American manufacturing depends on connecting with customers in growth markets all around the world. And so we’re incredibly excited to partner with ThomasNet in an effort to make these connections. In fact, according to ThomasNet.com’s Industry Market Barometer, nearly 7 out of 10 American manufacturers are selling overseas, and more than one-third of them plan to increase their international sales.
In the early days of Panjiva, we had access to data from the U.S. government that enabled us to profile suppliers from every country in the world except, ironically enough, America. More recently, we’ve been working to integrate additional shipping data that will enable us to profile American suppliers. However, to date, our efforts to make global trade more efficient and more transparent have had virtually no impact on an entire chunk of global trade — trade from America to the rest of the world. So frustrating! But today, thanks to our friends at ThomasNet, we’re taking a significant step forward in our efforts to connect global buyers with American suppliers. And we’re really fired up about it.
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Additional notes:
Due to changes in the reporting of the US Customs data that the Panjiva research team bases these assessments on, we are not able to provide information on number of manufacturers or active companies at this time. We are planning to reintroduce these metrics in 2013.
]]>Looking at year over year shipments for “halloween” related items, and “candy corns”, we see a softening:
The drop in candy corn imports to the US is especially severe, pointing to a true candy corn shortage. We checked in with Boston-based candy corn connoisseur Martin Clinton, who confirmed the dip in candy corn availability:
“Candy corn has been getting harder to find over the last two years. This year has been even more noticeable, with the added frustration that Brach’s candy corn in particular, has been especially difficult to find. In the past, it’s been everywhere: different supermarkets chains, as well as CVS, which has traditionally been filled with bags candy corn – and it’s chocolate and pumpkin cousins. This year, the Brach’s has been gone by early October and replaced with the ersatz store brand candy corn, which just can’t compare.”
There you have it folks. It’s a slightly less sweet Halloween this year.
h/t @martinclinton, our candy corn expert.
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The number of global manufacturers shipping to the U.S. went down — -4% — from August to September. August to September changes in previous years: -8% in 2011, -6% in 2010, -5% in 2009, -7% in 2008.
Additional notes:
- The percentage of significant manufacturers on the Panjiva Watch List remained steady at 19%.
- The percentage of significant buyers having done business with a Panjiva Watch List supplier in the preceding three months also remained at 26%.
Methodological notes:
- Manufacturers that have suffered a 50% or greater decline in volume shipped to American customers in the most recent three month period, versus the same period a year ago, are on the Panjiva Watch List.
- “Significant manufacturers” are companies that have sent 10 or more shipments to American customers within the last year. As of the end of August, there were
97,224 significant manufacturers. - “Significant buyers” are U.S. companies that have received 10 or more shipments from overseas manufacturers within the last year. As of the end of August, there were
83,108 significant buyers.
- The candidates for president will argue about who’s going to be tougher on China.
- Then, the next day, people will go nuts for the iPad Mini, a product that’s assembled in China.
In honor of this strange coincidence, we invite you to compete in the #ChinaChallenge. Correctly guess the combined number of times the candidates say “China” or “Chinese” in Monday night’s debate, and you could win an iPad Mini — or whatever the device actually ends up being called. Rules:
- NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.
- Guesses have to be in by 9 pm ET on Monday.
- To enter via Twitter, tweet your guess to @panjiva using #ChinaChallenge, so we know you’re not just tweeting random numbers at us.
- To enter via Weibo, message your guess to @磐聚网 using #总统竞选中国之战.
- You can also submit your guess by email (josh+cc@panjiva.com).
- One guess per person.
- If more than one person gets it right, we’ll draw from the metaphorical hat to see who gets the iPad Mini. PwC won’t be watching, but we’ll be fair. Promise.
- If no on gets it right, we’ll give the iPad Mini to the person whose guess was closest.
- We’ll pay for the Mini of your choice, but you’re responsible for any and all costs after the initial purchase.
Why are we doing this?
- To have some fun. (Since Panjivans aren’t eligible to win, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them turn this into a drinking game.)
- To point out the absurdity of protectionism in a world as interconnected as ours. Every four years, presidential candidates play the protectionism card, presuming consumers have no idea that trade enables us to have the stuff we love at the prices we want — or that trade gives businesses access to markets which are growing a lot faster than ours. Ok, to be fair, the candidates may well be right that people don’t know the role that trade plays in our daily lives. But what happens when one of the candidates becomes president and, as always seems to happen, wants to promote trade in an effort to bolster economic growth? They’re going to find that the seeds of protectionism they planted during election season have left them without support for pro-trade initiatives. Ok, hopping off the soapbox. It’s Mini time.
Follow @panjiva or #ChinaChallenge during the debate on Monday night for a live (albeit unofficial) count.
]]>How Did We Build Global Search?
In truth, I’m the wrong person to be answering this question, because I didn’t build Global Search. Panjiva’s engineers did.
Global Search is awesome because Panjiva’s engineers are awesome. They’re not the bragging type, but I am. Jim Psota, Panjiva’s co-founder and CTO, has put together an extraordinary team of engineers and articulates the over-arching product vision for Panjiva, at the heart of which you’ll find Global Search. Tim Garnett, Panjiva’s Lead Engineer and Technical Director, is the driving force behind Global Search, and Kevin Qi and Jeff Cohen round out the core Global Search team.
These guys were able to bring Global Search to life because they’re awesome — and because they had the support of so many others. The rest of the Panjiva engineering team pitched in, of course, as did product manager Carolyn Flood and the Global Search Launch Team, which consisted of talented folks from across the Panjiva organization.
Our engineers live in the code.
But the real heroes of Global Search are our clients, who have been teaching us for years about what they need to do their jobs. To our clients who patiently described their problems and their processes, and to the clients who gave us feedback on our earliest ideas for, and versions of, Global Search — thank you.
Ok, you’ve made it through the tech equivalent of an Academy Awards acceptance speech, and you still don’t know how we actually built Global Search. Well, basically, we developed technology that allowed us to do in an automated way what our clients were doing in a manual way: crawling the web in search of information and then piecing it together in a way that facilitated decision-making.
We started with the companies in our database and scoured the web for publicly available information about these companies — much as general search engines do. We paid attention to where we found this information and then looked around, on these websites, for more information about more companies involved in global trade. When all was said and done, we found relevant information about over 6 million companies on over 7 million web pages spread across nearly 500,000 unique domains.
The next step was to give our clients an easy way to access all this information. The Global Search interface was designed to accomplish three things:
- First, Global Search takes full advantage of all of the new data we’ve found to deliver better search results than ever before. Our clients prefer to see companies that have matching products and that can easily be contacted. Global Search gives priority to companies that have these characteristics and provides us with a flexible framework for incorporating even more relevant data in the years ahead.
- Second, Global Search delivers results, based on an obscene amount of data, really fast. I can’t tell you how Tim and team made it so fast, and, frankly, I hope they won’t tell you either. Hey, we need to have some secrets.
- Third, Global Search points you to the places around the web where all of this data originates, so you can know the source of information when determining how to use that information — and so you can easily hunt for more information. Just as Kayak sends you out to individual airline sites, we’re excited to send you to all the places on the web where you can find more information about companies engaged in global trade.
So that’s what we’ve been up to. It’s taken a year to get Global Search into the hands of our clients, and of course this year of work built on several years spent learning about the problems our clients faced and about how they used earlier incarnations of Panjiva.
As you can tell — after three blog posts! — we’re really proud of what we’ve built. But, frankly, there’s so much more work to be done, so now it’s time to get back to doing it.
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