Where to get foreign trade data for a country

Foreign trade data for a country comes in two layers. Official trade statistics (UN Comtrade, ITC Trade Map, Eurostat and national statistics offices) are free or mostly free and show how much a country imports and exports by product code and partner country. Shipment-level data, usually from paid services, shows individual shipments with the companies, weights and values behind those totals. Duties and import rules come from separate tariff databases. Which source you need depends on the question you are asking.

Start from the question

Free sources: official trade statistics

• UN Comtrade. The United Nations trade database: annual data from most countries and monthly data from many, by 6-digit HS code and partner country, going back decades. The HS code is the international product code used in foreign trade. Comtrade is the usual starting point for a world view.
• ITC Trade Map. A tool of the International Trade Centre, mostly free (free for users in developing countries). It presents similar data in a more convenient form, with trends, rankings of supplier countries and, for many countries, more detailed national codes. Where a country reports late, it shows estimates from its partners' data.
• Eurostat Comext. The EU's own trade database: trade of every member state, monthly, by the 8-digit codes of the EU Combined Nomenclature. For European markets it is more detailed and more current than international databases.
• National statistics offices and customs services. Most countries publish their own foreign trade statistics, often with national codes and the latest months before they reach international databases. The quality and the format of these releases differ a lot from country to country.
• Sector sources. For farm products, FAOSTAT, the statistics database of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, adds production figures. Industry associations often publish production and consumption data.

What official statistics do not give you:

• company names: statistics are totals, and no company is ever named;
• prices of individual shipments: only the total value and quantity, from which you can work out an average;
• fresh data: international databases usually lag by several months, sometimes a year or more;
• detail beyond 6 digits in international databases, so one code can mix your product with others.

When a country publishes late or hides details, use mirror statistics: what other countries report as their exports to it. Mirror figures never match exactly, because of different valuation, timing and goods passing through third countries, but they give you the order of magnitude.

Free sources: duties and import rules

• The official tariff of the importing country, published by its customs service, which is the legal source for the duty rate.
• WTO Tariff & Trade Data: applied and maximum agreed duty rates of WTO members.
• ITC Market Access Map: duties including preferences under trade agreements, plus trade remedies and some import requirements; mostly free.
• The World Bank's WITS tool, which combines trade and tariff data.

These answer "what will it cost to get in" but say nothing about who buys.

Paid sources: shipment-level data

Some countries make records of individual import and export shipments available. For a few countries, in particular for sea imports into the United States, the shipping documents of the cargo (bills of lading) are also public. Commercial services collect and clean this data; ImportGenius, Panjiva and Volza are among the better-known ones. Orion Markets also works with such data, but shows it to clients as ready answers: totals, shares, partner countries and company lists, not as individual records.

A shipment record typically shows the date, the importer and the foreign supplier, the product code and description, the countries involved, the weight and, depending on the country, the value and delivery terms. That is what statistics cannot give you: who exactly buys, from whom, how often and at what price per kilogram. How to read the figures built from this data is covered in How to read foreign trade figures.

Before you choose a provider, ask:

1. Which countries, and in which direction? No service covers the whole world at this level. Check that your target countries are covered, both imports and exports if you need both.
2. Which fields? Records built from shipping documents often have no value and sometimes no product code. Records from official shipment data usually have both.
3. How far back, and how fresh? Depth and update delay differ by country, often within the same service.
4. How are company names cleaned? The same company is often written in several ways. Without cleaning, one importer appears as many small ones.
5. Can you try before paying? Test the data on a product and a company you know well.

What Orion Markets covers

Orion Markets has shipment-level data for 14 countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Mexico, Chile, the Philippines, Argentina, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Colombia, Panama, Pakistan and Mongolia. Depth differs: for Russia the data goes back to 2012, for Kazakhstan to April 2021 and for Uzbekistan to 2022, while for most of the others the data starts in 2025 or 2026. For some recently added countries there is only one month so far. The current periods for each country are on the data coverage page.

Companies from 231 more countries appear as trade partners of these 14. A German exporter, for example, is visible through its shipments to the covered countries, but not through its sales to France. In total the database holds over 3.7 million companies.

Coverage can also change over time, and that shows up in the numbers. Since July 2025, data for Russia covers only trade with Kazakhstan. Market reports for Russia say this in a notice, because a comparison with earlier periods then shows the change in coverage, not the real movement of the market.

From this data the site builds ready answers: Company profiles, market reports in Analyze markets by product and the Ready-made research catalog (more than 4,300 reports in 13 countries), supplier and buyer lists in Find suppliers and Find buyers, a ranking of markets in Find new export markets, and country overviews in Countries.

Example: two layers for one market

Take printed circuit boards imported into Vietnam. Official statistics tell you how much Vietnam imports under HS heading 8534 each year and from which countries; that is enough to see that the market is large and supplied from Asia.

The free sample report printed circuit boards, imports into Vietnam on Orion Markets adds the layer below. For January to June 2026 it counts 252,329 shipments under two Vietnamese national codes, 996 importers in Vietnam and 2,215 foreign suppliers, with Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong as the main partner countries by value. Only shipment-level data answers which of those 996 importers buy the boards you make.

Common mistakes

• Adding statistics and shipment data together. They describe the same trade. Use one to estimate and the other to check.
• Comparing different periods. The latest month differs between sources and countries; compare the same months.
• Reading a coverage change as a market change. A sudden drop can mean that a source stopped covering part of the trade.
• Assuming full coverage. Check which countries and directions a shipment data service really has before you draw conclusions about "the market".
• Taking the partner country for the country of production. Goods often pass through trading hubs such as Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE or Panama.

To see what the data looks like for your product, open a free sample report in Ready-made research or check the list of countries and periods on the data coverage page.