Zepol is pleased to announce that we’ve created a new Dashboard tab for our products, TradeIQ™ and TradeView™. This enhancement allows users to view the four most essential searches for their businesses within the Zepol interface. Each Dashboard profile can be displayed numerically or in a Line, Pie, or Bar Chart, and users are able to select the number of Items, Measure, and Time Frame. The Dashboard can be downloaded to an Excel document and scheduled as an emailed report.

Please view the video below for more information on this enhancement and feel free to Contact Us in you have any questions.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have shown the effect that one country can have on international commerce. The global shipping industry has certainly felt a significant impact due to the damages done to many of the Japanese shipping ports.

According to Zepol’s TradeIQ™ application, Japan had 325,226 shipments that entered U.S. ports in 2010, accounting for roughly 3.5% of all ocean borne shipments entering the United States for that year. The Port of Sendai, which shipped almost 16,000 TEUs to the U.S. in 2010 (over 2% of the total TEUs brought from Japan to the U.S), was just one of the ports that was greatly devastated by these natural disasters. Imports and exports from Sendai have come to a halt, and only on March 18 was the port opened for the delivery of relief supplies. It is predicted that the recovery process for many of the damaged ports will take weeks, if not months.

Because Japan is a world leader in the production and distribution of electronic components, machinery, and automobiles, the damage done to its ports will undoubtedly have a worldwide effect. To help in the recovery of the Japanese infrastructure, please consider contributing to the American Red Cross by clicking the link below:

The U.S. Census Bureau released its Merchandise Trade data numbers on March 10th for January 2011. The Merchandise Trade balance increased an impressive 19% over January 2010, but posted a decrease of 5.77% over December 2010. Imports to the U.S. increased 22.19% from January 2010 to January 2011 and exports increased nearly 19% in the same time period.

Below is an in-depth breakdown of the U.S. Census Merchandise Trade data. This month we have highlighted 3 interesting items that we found while looking at January's data; here are the highlights:

1. Air cargo decreased
2. The value of oil increased
3. Consumer goods imports have decreased

Click here for Zepol's U.S. Census Merchandise Trade Data Update for January 2011

In the past few weeks, we have seen one of the largest jumps in gas prices since 2005. There has been a lot of debate recently about the causes of this increase in the price of oil. Although Libya only provides 2% of the oil to the United States, according to a recent CNN, article we can see in the data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau that in fact the price of oil from Libya has increased over the past few months.

The chart below illustrates the total Value of imports for crude oil, which has increased 31% since September 2010 when we started to see the rise in gas prices. We can also see a rise in the price per kilogram of crude oil, which has increased by $0.21 since January 2010 and by $0.18 since September 2010.

While conflict continues in areas that supply oil to the United States, we will continue to see shifts in oil prices.