For several years, Panjiva has been working to connect buyers and suppliers across borders.  Unfortunately, we have largely been unable to connect buyers with one very important group of suppliers — American suppliers.  Today, this changes, thanks to our newest partner, ThomasNet. Now buyers on Panjiva can use Global Search to access a whole world of suppliers, including over 500,000 suppliers in the United States.

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.