Zepol is built on a core belief that our services can help companies around the world improve their international business decision making processes. To help ensure that our customers receive the information they need, we work hard to build long-term relationships with companies rather than rely on individual, anonymous transactions to drive our business. In a way, this is much harder to do than the alternative, but we truly believe that to grow a sustainable business, our users and the public must trust us as an essential information source for their international business.

The first part of building our relationships with customers is that we are up front and honest with what we can do to help them and how we will do so. Our founders have a philosophy to under promise and over deliver, which has guided every relationship we have with our users. We make sure we ask the questions to understand what is most important to our customers and answer questions honestly, because we don’t want to waste anyone’s time dancing around issues.

We then work extremely hard to make sure that our customers get the most out of their subscriptions because they have invested greatly in our company and we need to ensure that they receive a tangible return. This means providing our industry’s best customer service and training. Instead of providing general training to our customers, our trade data specialists work with every one of our new customers in a customized training session. Yes, this takes a lot of time, but it is hugely important to help users get the most out of their investment in Zepol.

Like we have mentioned before, subscribing with Zepol is the same as investing in our company. We say this because we drive our revenues back into the development of our tools. We constantly enhance our products and give these upgrades directly to our customers on a monthly or even weekly basis. This breakneck pace of innovation is great for our users, especially since we prioritize and develop all upgrades based directly on their feedback.

Finally, the last part of a relationship is a two-way conversation, as we are a service provider to the international trade industry; we talk to our customers and show them how to do new things. That is part of what makes our user base very unique. Not every company that tries our tools will subscribe to our services, but we have found the organizations that are driving innovation and the leaders in their industries keep subscribing. We think a big part of this is they want to learn new ways to use trade data, which by itself is just raw information, but great tools like TradeIQ and TradeView show the data in new ways that creates the knowledge needed to drive new decisions.

On February 10th, the U.S. Census Bureau released their Merchandise Trade data numbers for December 2009, completing the year’s data. Exports finished strong with 4.83% growth from November and 10.42% growth from December 2008. The Merchandise Trade balance ended the year with a $500 billion total deficit, which is still 37.38% lower than 2008 totals.

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 December's data; here are the highlights:

1. Industrial Supplies and Materials Hit Hardest
2. Manufacturing Continues to Expand
3. Anti-Dumping Suits on Taiwan Do Not Effect Trade Patterns with U.S.
4. Printed Materials Still Going Strong
5. National Export Initiative Projections
   

Click here for Zepol's U.S. Census Merchandise Trade Data Update for December 2009

Zepol completed the data for January on February 6th in our U.S. Customs trade data tool, TradeIQ. Import shipments saw a 6.26% decrease from December and a 4.38% decrease from November, reflecting the annual event of consumer demand decreasing after the holiday season. This January did see a small 0.43% increase from January 2009 and it will be interesting to see how 2010 proceeds.

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

Over 70% of shipments imported into the U.S. came from Asia, with 37% from China alone; Hong Kong would be the next largest supplier with 10%. For some perspective, the port of Shanghai alone accounts for over 15% of import shipments to the U.S. Shanghai's share has been steadily increasing, seeing 11.5% growth since January 2009 and 5% growth just since November. European ports have not been fairing as well as reflected in the above chart. Shipments from Bremerhaven specifically, the largest European port for exports to the United States, have decreased almost 7% over the last year and almost 22% since December.  

Below are the top 10 International Ports shipping to the U.S. by shipment count:
Zepol's U.S. Customs trade data is taken from Bills of Lading entered into the Automated Manifest System. The 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.

I would like to thank everyone who downloaded our 2009 Ports Report. We have received some great feedback and I wanted to answer a couple of the common questions that we have received.

1. Where did we source the data from?
   
   We derived all of data in the report from our trade tools, TradeIQ and TradeView. Below is an explanation of where each of the trade data metrics are from:
   
   
   • TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) – This information is derived from U.S. Customs data. While not a data field that is received from Customs, Zepol uses a proprietary formula to compute the most accurate TEU counts in the industry. Zepol ensures that both FCL and LCL shipments have accurate TEU values.
     
     
   • Value of Imports – This data is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s trade statistics (HS6 Port dataset). Zepol takes the data released by the U.S. government to show the total value of imports for specific ports.
     
     
   • Number of Bills of Lading – This is the count of Bills of Lading for a specific port from U.S. Customs data. This is the count of all Bills of Lading (FCL and LCL) that list the U.S. port.
     
     
   • TEU Trend – Last 12 months of shipments by TEU from U.S. Customs data for the Port.
     
     
   • International Ports Pie Chart – This list the top international ports listed in U.S. Customs data for the port. The international port is the last port shipments left from before reaching the United States. Top 5 are shown along with an aggregation of the other.
     
     
   • Top Five Products by Containerized Value – Top 5 6-digit HTS Codes reported by the U.S. Census Bureau from shipments arriving in containers.
     
     
   • Five Key Importers – This will show five of the key importers for the port as they are listed in the U.S. Customs data that Zepol receives. This does not mean that they are necessarily the biggest importers to that port, but some of the bigger names. Some companies will not be listed because of confidential treatment of their shipment records.
     
     
   • Top Carrier Partners – Top carriers shown on importer’s Bill of Lading records by the SCAC submitted on U.S. Customs records. This is sorted by TEU volume.
   
   
2. What shipments were included in this report?
   
   All shipment records were included in this report. Zepol did not filter out empty containers or remove Bills of Lading that remained on the vessel. This can create an overstatement for some ports’ TEU volumes, particularly Seattle and Tacoma.
   
   
3. Why did you not group the ports of Newark and New York?
   
   Zepol chose not to group the ports of Newark and New York because the U.S. Customs data that we receive lists them as two separate ports. While they are under the same port district, they each have individual port codes.
   
   
4. Why do you require registration for the report?
   
   Zepol is asking for individuals to register to download the report because we wanted to gauge what industry the readers of this report represent in order to create informative reports in the future. We will also be able to notify registrants of new reports we create on other metrics from our data sets. To register and download this report, please click here.
   
   
5. If I have additional questions, who can I contact?
   
   Please email support@zepol.com or call 612.435.2191 Extension 2 and we will answer any questions you have.