Size Your Export Market With HS Trade Data

Before you spend a trade-show budget or a sales quarter on a new country, you want a rough answer to one question: is there enough demand for my product there, and who holds it? HS trade data can answer a useful part of that question, if you pick the right code, read a few signals in order, and stay honest about what the data does not cover.

Who this is for

This guide is for export sales, business development and market research people who have to recommend which destination markets to work next. You know your product and you can find its HS code. You need a defensible shortlist of markets, not a 60-page consultancy report.

Step 1: Pin down the HS code and the destination

Market sizing is only as good as the product definition behind it.

1. Use the narrowest code that still matches what you sell. The Harmonized System is shared internationally at the 6-digit level; countries add their own national digits beyond that. Six digits is usually the right level for comparing countries. Use national 8- or 10-digit lines only when you compare within one destination.
2. Check what else sits under the same code. A 6-digit subheading can include products you do not make. Read the subheading text and note anything that would inflate your number.
3. Pick a destination and a time window. Use at least three recent years so one unusual year does not set your view.

If you are not sure of the code, start with an HS code lookup and confirm the classification before you size anything.

Step 2: Read market size and trend

Start with country-level import statistics for your code. Public sources include:

• UN Comtrade for reported imports and exports by country and HS code.
• ITC Trade Map for the same kind of statistics with partner and trend views.
• USA Trade Online from the U.S. Census Bureau for detailed U.S. figures.
• Eurostat Comext for EU member states.

Read three things:

• Import value in the latest full year. This is the size of the pond.
• Direction over several years. Growing, flat or shrinking matters as much as size.
• Unit value (value divided by quantity) where quantities are reported. It tells you whether the market buys at a price level close to yours.

Be careful with comparisons. Countries publish on different schedules, revise figures, and can value imports and exports on different bases, so one country's reported imports from a partner often do not match that partner's reported exports (UN Comtrade explains these bilateral asymmetries). Compare like with like, and note which source and year each number comes from.

Step 3: Check who supplies the market today

The same statistics break imports down by origin country. This shows who you would compete with:

• If one or two origins supply almost everything, find out why (price, proximity, trade agreements) before you assume you can win share.
• If your own country already supplies part of the market, that is a useful sign that the route, documents and buyers may already exist.

Tariff and origin rules can tilt the field, so check the duty your product faces on that route. Our guide on landed cost for a trade lane shows how to turn that into a quote-ready number.

Step 4: Check buyer concentration

Country totals tell you how big the market is. They do not tell you how many companies you could actually sell to. For that you need company-level evidence such as shipment records, which show which importers brought in goods under your code.

Look for:

• How many distinct importers appear for your code and destination.
• What share of shipments the largest few hold. These are shares of the importers visible in the records, not of the whole market. A market where the top three visible importers take most shipments behaves very differently from one with hundreds of small buyers.

A common way to put one number on concentration is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index: square each company's market share and add the results. The U.S. Department of Justice explains the HHI in its merger guidance; you can use the same arithmetic on importers' shares of visible shipments as a rough indicator, not a legal test.

What concentration means for you:

• High concentration: fewer, larger accounts. Plan for longer, account-based selling and a few strong introductions.
• Low concentration: many smaller buyers. Plan for a repeatable shortlist-and-outreach workflow.

For more on what shipment records reveal, and what they miss, read Bill of lading data: what it reveals about buyers.

What not to conclude from partial coverage

Trade data is evidence, not a census of every buyer.

• Shipment-level records are not available for every country. Many countries do not publish importer names. A market with no visible importers may simply be one you cannot see.
• Small or indirect buyers can be invisible. Goods bought through distributors, agents or consolidators show up under the intermediary's name.
• Codes can be misused. Some shipments are declared under a neighbouring code, so totals for your code can be over- or under-stated.
• Past imports are not future orders. A strong last year can reflect one large project.

Write down the coverage behind every number. If a source says its coverage for a country is partial, say so in your recommendation instead of rounding it up to "the market".

Put it together: a one-page market scorecard

For each candidate market, fill one row:

Rank markets on size, trend and fit together. A smaller, growing market with many visible importers can be a better first target than a large market controlled by a few incumbents.

Ask Analyst to do the first pass

EximAgent's Analyst works from shipment records and its company directory. You can ask it about market size and price trends, buyer concentration, who imports a product, and company profiles and similar companies. Its answers come with sources and say whether coverage is complete or partial.

Ask Analyst for market size and buyer concentration (see pricing for applicable charges).

When you have picked a market, Analyst's findings can give Outbound its starting context for an outreach campaign. Working in Cursor, Claude Code or Codex? Use the EximAgent CLI or connect the EximAgent connector.

Related reading

• Trade data vs company databases
• How to choose an import-export data provider: 5 checks
• How to find buyers for export
• Market intelligence vs competitive intelligence