The stakes
Trade is the bloodstream of economic intelligence. Who ships what to whom, in what volume, from which company to which company. That is where geopolitics, supply chains, and currency flows actually meet the ground.
The data underneath is fragmented. Every country reports trade through its own customs authority, in its own format, on its own schedule. Stitching it together into one global view is a full-time job, and most analysts spend more time on the stitching than on the analysis.
The mandate
The China Economic Information Service is the economic intelligence arm of Xinhua, China's national news agency. Its analysts and product teams track global trade flows and turn them into reports, dashboards, and signals used across Chinese government and industry. To do that work at the speed of the news cycle, they needed one consistent global view of the companies behind the flows. Not the country-by-country picture you get for free. The clean, joined-up version.
What we built
We built that view. Importers and exporters across 200+ markets, sourced from each country's official trade and registry authority, normalised into one structure so a CEIS analyst can move from Vietnam to Brazil to Germany without changing their query.
Each company carries the fields that matter for trade work. Registry identifier, headquarters and trading addresses, sector, ownership chain, and the goods categories they actually move. The data refreshes against the source rather than sitting frozen.
A CEIS analyst can filter for, say, every Vietnamese electronics exporter shipping into the U.S. with more than fifty million dollars in declared annual flow, and pull the list in seconds.
What changed
CEIS now reports against one global company picture instead of stitching local feeds of varying quality. Their analysts spend their time on the analysis, not on the cleaning. When a trade story breaks, the company-level view is already there.
Why it matters
Trade analysis is only as strong as the company list underneath it. We supplied the list.