Panjiva Blog: Global Trade Trends - Part 2

#ChinaChallenge – Win an iPad Mini on Debate Night

Josh Green | October 18, 2012
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Next week, two interesting things are going to happen, one right after the other:

  1. The candidates for president will argue about who’s going to be tougher on China.
  2. 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?

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.

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Global Search Part III: How Did We Build Global Search?

Josh Green | October 11, 2012
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Earlier this week, I bragged about what makes Global Search awesome.  And, yesterday, I shared why we built Global Search.  Today, one final post on how we built Global Search.  Comments or questions about Global Search?  Email me at josh+gs@panjiva.com.

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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Global Search Part II: Why Did We Build Global Search?

Josh Green | October 10, 2012
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Yesterday, I bragged about what makes Global Search awesome.  Today, I’ll share why we built Global Search, and tomorrow I’ll wrap up this series of posts by describing how we built it.  Comments or questions about Global Search?  Email me at josh+gs@panjiva.com.

Why Did We Build Global Search?

The short answer is that we wanted to deliver a better experience for people trying to connect with companies around the world.  Here’s the longer answer…

We launched Panjiva in an effort to make it easier to do business across borders.  Our belief was that global trade was inefficient and opaque, limiting the benefits that resulted from global trade and making it possible for companies to engage in behavior that harmed people and the environment.  We believed well-designed technology could make a difference on both of these fronts and that Panjiva could bring this technology to life.

As a first step, we built a search engine that enabled companies to find and evaluate each other based on objective data.  When we showed clients the product, we consistently got two responses:

  1. This is cool.
  2. Can you bring us even more data?

And so we continued on in our effort to collect and organize objective data about companies engaged in global trade.  The result of this effort was the Panjiva that existed before Global Search.

Interestingly, as we learned more about how our clients were using Panjiva, we learned that they were often using the objective information found on Panjiva as a jumping off point — and then heading out to the web in an effort to find additional information.  Specifically, they were hunting for product photos and contact information for the companies they found on Panjiva.

This hunt was a pain.  There are tons of B2B portals where information about companies involved in global trade can be found.  And, of course, lots of companies involved in global trade have their own websites.  Search engines can point you to this information, but then you have to piece it together — a jigsaw puzzle of epic proportions.

As we thought about the challenges that our clients were facing, it reminded us of the problems that consumers faced before the rise of travel websites like Kayak.  Remember when you had to visit the Delta website and the United website and the Southwest website — and then piece together all the information you found before making a decision?

Well, that’s basically the situation that sourcing executives are faced with…  except that they are trying to piece together information, from hundreds of thousands of web domains, in order to make multi-million dollar decisions.  Why shouldn’t they have access to the same types of tools that consumers have access to?

We believe they should.  That’s why we developed Global Search.  To provide easy access to the world’s most comprehensive information — both objective and self-reported information — on companies involved in global trade, regardless of where this information originates.

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Global Search Part I: Why is Global Search Awesome?

Josh Green | October 8, 2012
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Last week, we introduced Global Search.  I’m grateful to our clients for teaching us how to make their lives easier, and I’m incredibly proud of the product that our engineers have built.  For those who are interested in the product itself, I’d like to highlight a few things that make Global Search awesome.  For those who are curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I’ll also describe why and how we created Global Search in subsequent blog posts.  Comments or questions about Global Search?  Email me at josh+gs@panjiva.com.

Why is Global Search Awesome?

You can see the official marketing propaganda here, but the punch line is that Global Search is awesome because it gives you unprecedented access to an unbelievable amount of information about companies involved in global trade — 6 million of them!

Broadly speaking, there are two classes of information that you can access with Global Search:

  1. Objective information about companies involved in global trade and
  2. Information that comes from the companies themselves.

For some time now, we’ve had objective information on Panjiva — information describing the track record, financial health, red flags, and certifications of hundreds of thousands of companies involved in global trade.  And, by giving our clients access to this information, we’ve made the process of finding and evaluating trading partners much easier.

Global Search builds on a base of objective information by bringing to your fingertips massive amounts of self-reported information — information provided by the companies themselves.  Of course, this self-reported information is very different from objective information, which comes from third parties.  And I wouldn’t recommend making significant business decisions based SOLELY on self-reported information.  But there are two ways in which self-reported information can be enormously helpful, particularly when combined with objective data:

  1. Product photos help you figure out if a company supplies the products you need, and
  2. Contact information can help you get in touch.

Global Search gives you access to over 35 million product photos, over 5 million phone numbers, and over 2 million email addresses — in addition to all the objective information that you’ve come to rely on Panjiva for.  And, of course, all of this information is intelligently organized, making it easier than ever before to find, evaluate, and make contact with companies that are right for you.  Seriously, it’s awesome.

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August 2012 Trade Data: Dipped

Emily | September 25, 2012
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The word from the Panjiva research team: trade activity experienced a dip in August.  Specifically, the numbers of waterborne shipments coming into the U.S. experienced a -3% month-over-month decrease from July to August.  Previous years July to August changes: +4% in 2011, +4% in 2010, +3% in 2009, +0.1% in 2008.

The number of global manufacturers shipping to the U.S. went down — -1% — from July to August.  July to August changes in previous years: +2% in 2011, +1% in 2010, +1% in 2009, -1% 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 96,624 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 82,781 significant buyers.
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July Trade Data: Green Shoots?

Emily | August 28, 2012
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The word from the Panjiva research team: trade activity experienced a healthy bump in July. Specifically, the number of waterborne shipments coming into the U.S. experienced a 9% month-over-month increase from June to July. Previous year’s June to July changes: +5% in 2011, +2% in 2010, +12% in 2009, +8% in 2008.

The number of global manufacturers shipping to the U.S. went up — +5% — from June to July. June-to-July changes in previous years: +2% in 2011, +0.2% in 2010, +7% in 2009, and +6% 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 July, there were 96,644 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 July, there were 82,767 significant buyers.
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Ethanol Exports Hit Peak in 2012

patrick | August 22, 2012
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The 2012 drought has sunk corn harvests to record lows and revived discussion (and controversy) over ethanol. The EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard requires that a portion of the corn harvest be used to produce ethanol, but some have called for the EPA to waive the quota due to this year’s drought.

A look at Panjiva’s data shows that ethanol exports reached an all-time high in early 2012. Furthermore, in the past two years US ethanol exports have tripled — from an average of about $100 million/quarter in 2010 to an average of over $300 million/quarter in 2012.

Most of the increase in exports is attributable to Brazil. The South American country also produces ethanol, though theirs is sugar-based. The increase in Brazilian corn-based ethanol imports from the U.S. beginning in 2011 occurred after a bump in world sugar prices. The other top importers of U.S. ethanol are the Netherlands, Mexico, and the U.K.

Panjiva will continue watching ethanol exports in the coming months to measure any impact from the summer drought.

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Help Panjiva Avert the Dangers of Big Data at SXSW

katelyn | August 15, 2012
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Big Data is on everyone’s mind this year. And grappling with Big Data is fundamental to what we do at Panjiva. This year we want to take some of our fundamental Big Data problems, and their solutions, to SWSX (if there’s anyone left who doesn’t know: SXSW is THE annual event for makers, from film and music to the interactive space).

Our CTO, Jim Psota, has proposed a Big Data focused session: “Super Heroes Needed: Averting Dangers of Big Data.” In this session, Jim will address which factors make data sets reliable (or not); how the proliferation of open source data has changed the way we mine, analyze and present information; and how technology and the human touch can work in tandem to mitigate Big Data dangers.

Interested in finding out more about the risks of Big Data? Want to know how to stay off the No Fly list? Then help Jim’s panel get chosen by participating in the SXSW Panel Picker process! Check out our video proposal then all you have to do is create an account, confirm it via email, and click the thumbs up logo on the left side of Jim’s panel proposal. Voting ends on August 31, so get those votes in today!

Watch the proposal: Super Heroes Needed: Averting Dangers of Big Data

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Air conditioner imports rise with summer temperatures

patrick | July 23, 2012
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Signs of a scorching summer are apparent all around the U.S.: wilting crops in the grain belt, wildfires in Colorado, and record-high imports of air conditioners. U.S. imports of window AC units hit a 3-year high in March 2012 at $255 million, or 1.8 million units. April 2012 saw the next highest number of imports of the past three years, at $253 million. See Panjiva’s full report on window AC units.

These trends suggest that many U.S. importers predicted an unusually hot summer back in January. Products transported via ocean freight, like AC units, typically take 30-45 days to ship from Asia to the U.S. (China supplies nearly all of America’s window air conditioners). Thus, an import spike in March means that orders probably spiked in mid to late-January.

Air conditioners aren’t the only imports rising with the summer heat. Indoor fan imports also hit a 3-year high in 2012, with $163 million imported in April. That’s almost 10% higher than the next highest month, May 2009. See Panjiva’s full report on indoor fans.

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June Trade Data – Steady Going (For Now)

Emily | July 18, 2012
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The word from the Panjiva research team: trade activity was steady in June. Specifically, the number of waterborne shipments coming into the U.S. experienced a 2% month-over-month increase from May to June. Previous year’s May to June changes: -1% in 2011, +2% in 2010, -2% in 2009, -5% in 2008.

The number of global manufacturers shipping to the U.S. went up ever so slightly — +0.4% — from May to June. May-to-June changes in previous years: -1% in 2011, +1% in 2010, -1% in 2009, and -2% in 2008.

Additional notes:

  • The percentage of significant manufacturers on the Panjiva Watch List went up from 18% to 19%.
  • The percentage of significant buyers having done business with a Panjiva Watch List supplier in the preceding three months also went up from 25% to 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 June, there were 95,939 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 June, there were 82,489 significant buyers.
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