The U.S. Census Bureau released its Merchandise Trade data numbers on July 13th for May 2010. The Merchandise Trade balance increased 52.8% over last May and decreased 0.4% from the previous month. Imports grew by 2.0% from April, and gained 33.5% over last year; while exports rose 3.2% from the previous month and increased 25.9% over May 2009.

Below is an in-depth breakdown of the U.S. Census Merchandise Trade data released last week. This month we have highlighted 5 interesting items that we found while looking at May's data; here are the highlights:

1. China Rising on the Back of American Consumers
2. Exports are Up, but to Whom?
3. Shrimp Imports Show Signs of the Gulf Oil Spill
4. Canada’s Trade Well Positioned
5. Where Does All of this Gold Come from?
   

Click here for Zepol's U.S. Census Merchandise Trade Data Update for May 2010

Freakonomics recently posted an article titled “Fair Trade and the Food Movement” that questioned the practicality of Fair Trade coffee. Specifically, the article noted that Fair Trade importers dump excess Fair Trade coffee on the conventional market when demand lags.

Curious as usual, we here at Zepol wanted to know more. So, we did a quick search for the United States’ importing trend for “Fair Trade Coffee” over the last seven years. South and Central American countries make up the bulk of the United States’ Fair Trade coffee imports. Below is a trend of the yearly trade from the top South and Central American exporting countries to the United States since 2003.

As you can see, Fair Trade coffee exports from the top five Central and South American countries to the U.S. have been steadily increasing as a whole since 2003. We might expect to see regular coffee exports from these same countries decreasing over this time frame since Fair Trade exports experienced so much growth. However, this is not the case.

A look at non-Fair Trade coffee exports from these countries fails to show that regular coffee exports decrease as Fair Trade coffee exports rise. Instead, the data shows relatively stable demand for coffee from 2003 - 2010. Could it be that the regular coffee market is merely sustaining its current demand while all coffee export growth occurs in the Fair Trade sector? What do you think?

 

Over the last month, Zepol has incorporated three major enhancements to our products that provide additional value to our subscribers:

1. View and Search by Place Receipt to determine the shipments' port of origin
2. Select multiple items for U.S. Port, Intl Port, and Carrier Searches for more complete analysis of any industry’s or company’s trade flow
   
3. Schedule and send automated reports to have any set of search results sent to your inbox on an ongoing basis, significantly reducing the time needed to do trade analysis

These enhancements will greatly improve our subscriber’s productivity and allow them to find the data they want in new, intuitive ways. See all the great new things you can do in our tools by watching the video that we have created below:

Zepol is proud of these enhancements and would like to celebrate by providing free trials to readers of our blog and any company interested in Zepol’s trade intelligence tools. Click here to sign up for your free trial.

On July 6th, we completed the data for June in our U.S. Customs trade data tool, TradeIQ. June marks the fifth month in a row in which import shipments increased, rising 10.41% over May. June 2010 shipments also rose significantly over the previous year, up 23.21% over June 2009.

Below is a table showing port regions of the world where shipments originated:

In our U.S. Customs Update for May, we discussed how though Asian trade is growing relative to recent months, the region's shipments have yet to return to pre-recession levels. Now that we have the June data needed to complete Quarter 2, we can see that with 1,698,411 shipments, Quarter 2 of 2010 is up 3.33% over the same quarter in 2008, suggesting that Asian trade is closer to pre-recession levels. Quarter 3 data will be even more telling, as this quarter is historically the biggest in terms of shipments to the United States from Asia.

Below is a chart of Asia's quarterly shipments, starting with Quarter 3 of 2007:

 

The collection methods used by U.S. Customs for AMS data can lead to an overstatement of shipments for some ports, as imports and exports from Prince Rupert and Vancouver are often recorded as imports for the U.S. Moreover, the data includes shipments from empty containers, may overstate totals from transshipments, and may contain other data anomalies as well.

Zepol's U.S. Customs trade data is derived from Bills of Lading entered into the Automated Manifest System. This information represents the number of House manifests entered by importers of waterborne containerized goods. This indicator is the earliest data available for the previous month’s trade activity.