Jannine

Hello everyone, welcome to our webinar. We are going to start very soon, just waiting for
everybody to roll in and then we'll get started in about two minutes.  

For those of you just joining, thank you and welcome to our ‘Mexico All Modes’ webinar.
We are going to give it another 30 seconds and we'll get started soon.

Okay, let's get started. Thank you everybody for joining. You have joined our latest webinar, ‘Discover the Next Generation of Mexico Trade Intelligence’ featuring our Director of Account Management, Carolyn James. So she's going to walk you through this new dataset that we have, which is one of the best trade datasets in the world. And with Mexico being the US's largest trading partner, this is more important and relevant to you than ever.
So she's going to tell you why, she's going to show you everything about it and what makes the signals so rich, provide a demo and leave some time at the end to take some questions. So if you can pop your questions in the chat at the bottom, we'll leave about 10 minutes at the end. So let’s get started.
Carolyn, how about you introduce yourself?

Carolyn

Certainly. So hi everyone, it's a pleasure to be here with you today. As Janine mentioned, I'm the Director of Account Management here at ImportGenius and I am based in New York City.

Jannine

Thank you. I'd like to start with a poll. So hopefully you can all see this right now.
And just to get a sense of who's joining today. So I wanted to understand what is your primary use case for trade data? Okay, I can still see people answering. I'll give it 10 more seconds.
Okay, I'm going to just share the results so you can all see. It's quite a quite a split between
supplier discovery, competitor tracking, lead generation and even just market research and
analysis, a little bit of supply chain visibility and for compliance. So everybody feel free to just pop your questions in the chat as I asked, we will be doing another poll later on and I'm going to pass it over to Carolyn.

Carolyn

Great, thanks Janine.

So I imagine a lot of people here are, there we go. A lot of people here already are interested in Mexico, which is why folks have joined. I want to spend a bit of time setting the context and talking about US-Mexico trade and really highlighting why this is such an important and significant relationship in the world of trade. So, you know, first and foremost, why Mexico? Mexico, as Jannine said, is the US's largest trading partner by value. It overtook China in 2023 as the largest trading partner. And what we're looking at here is a chart showing Mexico trade as well as China trade with the United States. China trade is the red or
pink line. Mexico trade is the blue line. In 2025, the value of US-Mexico trade was, or should I say US imports from Mexico, was $534.9 billion and it grew at nearly 6% year-over-year growth. So huge amount of trade, very strong growth rate, very, very important.
Secondly, and why we're talking about this dataset specifically today is when we talk about
Mexico, it is all about the land border. The US-Mexico land border is the busiest land border in the world. Over 80% of US-Mexico trade occurs across the land border and more than 73% of this trade is traveling on trucks alone.
Another fun fact for you, because I do love facts and figures, 40% of trade passes through the port of Laredo, Texas. And in 2022, the port of Laredo, Texas actually had more container
throughput than the largest seaport in the United States, which was LA Long Beach. So again, really just highlighting, this is a huge opportunity. There's a huge amount of trade. Again, I imagine most people on this call are aware of that and that's why you're here, but I think these are very cool, interesting facts to point out to people.
Again, talking about trucking, this chart is showing Mexico imports and exports by mode of transit.On the left-hand side on exports, we see mode of transit, that blue-green color being trucking. So you can see again, lion's share is trucking. On the right-hand side, we see Mexico imports and you see a kind of more even split between truck and maritime. And to kind of put this differently, this is showing the relationships that Mexico has in terms of trade. Lots of maritime imports from China and lots of imports from the United States as well.

The next point I want to make is again, we've now been talking a lot about Mexico imports to United States, but the U.S.-Mexico trade and the border is a two-way street. 80% of all goods produced in Mexico are exported to the United States and 40% of all Mexican imports are from the United States. It is actually the second biggest source of U.S. exports on that side. The other thing I'd like to talk about is I think a lot of people, maybe a common misconception is when you think about things made in Mexico and imported into United States, you think about agriculture, avocados, blueberries, things like this, which Mexico is certainly a powerhouse in. But really when we're talking about value of trade here, we are talking about a very advanced economy. We're talking about advanced trade. 71.7% of the goods that are traveling across the border by value are USMCA-compliant goods. These are goods that are traveling back and forth the border across the border, often multiple times in a value-add process. The top exports to the United States from Mexico are not in fact
agriculture. They're actually vehicles, machinery, electrical machinery, and medical devices.
So again, a lot of high-value advanced manufacturing happening across this border.

And now kind of getting into the nitty-gritty. So for folks who have been with us for a while, there's a number of ways we can understand US and Mexico trade. Traditionally, we've had Mexico maritime data. We've also had US import data, which I imagine again many people on this call have. I'm going to start kind of contrasting the US import data with this new data set. US import data really importantly is seaborne data only. The United States government by law only releases maritime data. So again, if we really want to understand US-Mexico trade, we need to rely on a different data set because we don't have visibility on the lion's share of what is actually going back and forth across the US-Mexico border for trade.
On the other side, if you have Mexico maritime data, this is of course seaborne data only. So this data set that we have, Mexico all modes, and we also do sell a US-Mexico border data set as well, is the only way that you can see this really important and valuable land border data. A couple other key fields I want to touch on and then we will get into a demo.
HS codes, lots of people want to be able to see this. Mexico all modes and Mexico border data does have the HS code. Unlike the US data where that data is, that HS code is actually imputed, this is the actual HS code on the customs declaration. So again, can be very useful. It also goes to the 10th digit, so it's quite detailed as well.

Number two, product descriptions. So the US and Mexico all modes both have product descriptions. This is great because you can see things like brand names and brands in the data. The Mexico maritime data only has the description of the HS code, so you will not see brand names and details like that. So another benefit of the Mexico all modes data.

Next, we have tariff regimes. Tariff regimes describe basically the transformations that happen under USMCA, under MX is another way to describe this. And this is showing you whether goods are being imported or exported as final imports and exports, finished goods, whether they are considered return of merchandise and are moving back and forth across the border for transformation. Relatedly, you can also see the value add that is created in Mexico as well as the value add that's taxed under these rules. So really great, really
detailed.
Speaking to, again, more of the detail, this data is also itemized. This is one of the reasons why personally it's my favorite data set. One of the challenges we have with the US import data is its shipment level. A shipment refers to a single container, a single item, or any number of containers. So oftentimes a shipment can contain multiple things in the same container. For our folks who said they were doing market analysis, it's really hard to separate the value and the quantity and the counts when you have a shipment that has multiple things, because you have to figure out what percentage of that shipment is shoes or chairs or whatever the items are. In the case of the Mexico all modes data, this is specifically itemized. So you have an HS code, you have a description, you have a value for each individual thing inside any given declaration.

The side comment I'll just mention, and again I'll show this, because it is itemized, there is a field called declaration, and you can roll up the shipments by declaration and essentially see shipment level, or I should say roll up the items by declaration, and you can see shipment level information.
Lastly, I sort of mentioned value. We do have value in the US, sorry, in the US-Mexico border
data and the Mexico all modes data. Value, unfortunately, is not part of the US import data set. So again, really great to have this. And then last but not least, it has a five week lag, which is the industry leader for Mexico data, and it's a significant improvement upon our Mexico maritime data.

Jannine

All right, thank you for the comparison, Carolyn.
Let's launch into our second poll. How confident are you that your current trade data gives you a complete picture of supplier activity in Mexico? I'll give it another 30 seconds. Interesting to see that only one person has said very confident so far.

Carolyn

Well, hopefully this gives everyone, you know, some insight onto another data set they can look at, because again, this is very powerful in terms of what it describes and what it details. So it’s pretty exciting.

Jannine

Let's share the results.
Okay, so with that, let's hop into the demo.

Carolyn

Great. Okay, so firstly, I want to cover mode of transit.
So we are looking at our Mexico data, and we're looking at our Mexico exports. And one of the things that you're able to do in this data set is you're able to filter by transportation type. So in this case, I'm looking at Carretero, or truck transportation, coming out of Mexico.
And we see we have over 32 million results in the last one year. Just to show you guys, this is the date range we're looking at. And here now, when we search for transport type, not only can you search for each of those, you can actually select the mode of transit. So that way, you don't have to try and guess how to spell some of these things, you can just
simply select what you'd like.

The next thing I want to show is the ability to search by HS code. So we'll look at another example. So here again, we're looking at Mexico export data, and we're looking at HS code 85, chapter 85. This is the chapter for machinery and equipment. And here we see a bunch of results for that. Again, one of the things I want to cover is searching with HS code. This can be really helpful. One, if you are not a native Spanish speaker, or you're not sure how your products are described, you can search by the HS code, and you can see the product description in Spanish. When you are searching by HS code, I always recommend using the starts with and search for chapters or kind of sub chapters, and add your digits. And again, here's 85. And to kind of talk through one of these results, we'll go ahead and pop up the shipment details. Here we can see in this case, the shipper on record is Flextronics, based in Jalisco. The consignee we're not seeing showing up, we're able to see that this is some kind of panel indicator, we see the HS code under which it was shipped. This particular shipment was exported from Mexico on March 31 of this year. We can see the value in Mexico pesos as well as the value in US dollars. The weight of that, we see that this particular good traveled by truck, destined for the United States. And we can see how many pieces, the weight of that shipment and the customs authority from which it departed in Mexico. And lastly, I had mentioned the regime, but here we see this is an example of the MX records. So this is considered a return of merchandise. We see the commercial value of the goods. We see that 62,000 Mexican pesos in value was added for this particular shipment, and that it was not taxed when it left. So again, a huge amount of detail we're able to see.

And then moving on to some more specific examples, I mentioned being able to search by brand names and by parts. Here we're looking at the company Ford. This is actually Mexico import data. And again, making the point of the bilateral trade or the two-way trade that we see, these are all of the imports that we see that are coming from Ford Motor or going to one of Ford Motor's Mexican entities. And we can see a whole bunch of different parts and pieces. And again, I'm going to kind of scroll somewhat slowly to show we see Ford Motor company in the US going to Ford Motor in Mexico. And we're going to again, look at this regime field.
So here we see our customs regimes, and we can see things that are final imports and final
exports, as well as things that are under IMEX and various different customs regimes. And then on the export side, we can see the same. We can see things that are being sent to the United States that are either returns of merchandise as the value add is happening, as these goods move back and forth across the border, often multiple times in the very complex manufacturing process that is the automotive industry.

And again, we'll look at the customs regime here. And here again, we see a number of final
imports and exports and also a significant number of return of merchandise.

And this was, this is everything I really hope to cover.So I will pause and see if Janine has collected any questions from the audience that we want to raise.

Jannine

Yes, and I also just popped a booking link for anyone who wants to see a personalized
demo or has any specific questions. Okay, we have a question from David, and he's asking if it shows the consignee. And maybe while you're on that question, you can answer what is the difference between value and commercial value?

Carolyn

Sure. So the Mexico data has both shipper and consignee as available fields. They have very high fill rates. It's not perfect, so it's not all the time, but you are able to see both the shipper and the consignee on the records in both the import and the export data. Great question about commercial value versus value. You can kind of think of this wholesale price versus retail price. That's the notion or the spirit of those two distinct fields.

Jannine

Thank you. We've got another question asking, do you provide lists of companies that trade across the U.S.-Mexico border for sales teams?

Carolyn

We certainly do. We actually have a special list that we sell. We enhance the list with thermographic information as well as contact information, but it is fundamentally derived from this data. So definitely book a meeting with someone to learn a bit more about that, but definitely a great way to access this data and get some very valuable information.

Jannine

Thank you. Okay, are there any differences in coverage for land transport between the U.S.-
Mexico border data set and this data set?

Carolyn

That's a great question. The answer is no. One of the things that we've done for folks who, there are some folks who care about the Mexico market or they need to understand all modes of transit, maybe because they want to see Chinese maritime flows in, things like that. We have the all modes data for that. For folks who really are saying we're based in the U.S., we really only care about U.S.-Mexico trade, we've created from this data set, the U.S.-Mexico border data set. So it is, one way to think about it is it is the subset of all of the shipments or items in here that the final destination is the United States. So it does actually include the maritime U.S. data as well, as of course the majority of the land border data. So that's there, it is at an extra discounted price than buying all the data, so it's a great deal if you just have the U.S. data.

Jannine

Thank you. Can you see land shipments from Mexico heading to Canada or other countries?

Carolyn

Yes, you sure can. We have this field, I doubt we'll see this in Ford, but we'll take a look at some of these fields. So we see the final destination country, we see the country of origin, and then we see this field called transit country name, which is actually the country of the owner of the goods as they move back and forth across the border. But here we can see, for example, things going to Canada by a truck from Mexico. And we see, in this case, we happen to be looking at Ford. Ford is based in the United States, and likely this truck not only drove through Mexico, but it’s owned by Ford in the United States as it's crossing the border, which is why we see United States of America in the transit country field.

Jannine

Great. Someone is asking about our auto translation in the future for Spanish to English data.

Carolyn

Yeah, this is a great question. So, I mean, two things to say here. First and foremost, in Poor
Genius, we really want you to be able to see the records as they come in. So one of the things that we will never do is translate everything and hide the original context. This is particularly important for things like the product description field. We want you to see what
was actually written. We also recognize the challenge for some people in usability, so we do plan on offering translation, particularly translated search. Things like one of the things that we've done to ease this is our mode of transit, which is here, having the drop-down options to choose from. But very shortly we will translate the mode of transit so you don't have to figure out Spanish to know which ones to select. We will do the same for country as well. And then, you know, for folks that don't, while we work on product description translation, which will take some time, I really encourage people to utilize the HS codes. Look at the Spanish descriptions of those HS codes to, again, be able to see more clearly. Yeah, it's one of the funny things because I feel like most of the people I talk to who have US data often want to search HS code and they're frustrated. And now you finally have the ability to search by HS code, which often ends up being more elegant of a search than doing keywords because you can do things like search chapter 85, which is machinery, or chapter 63, which is
textiles. So that hopefully that helps.

Jannine

This is an interesting question. What separates your top 10% of users from everyone else? So essentially, what are the power users actually doing day-to-day that the average user isn’t?
Maybe you could speak to our alerts on this one.

Carolyn

Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on industry, but I think the the meta point is people who are using this a lot, they've been able to figure out how to extract value. For people who are sales teams, they are setting up searches and saving those searches, and they're able to run those and update those and pass them out to their teams. For other people who are maybe doing intelligence or even trademark work, they are looking and setting up alerts for shipments of products that they're tracking, companies they're tracking to identify are there
new records coming in that are potentially in violation of a trademark agreement that I have or that are potentially under some sort of thing that I'm investigating or I want to track, and they’re able to log in and view those very quickly and efficiently. So it runs the gamut on use case, I would say.

Jannine

Okay, a question from Dim. Is there a way to find out the email address of the supplier or
consignee in your system?

Carolyn

It's a great question. So you can request contact information. We do offer contact credits, so that's one thing that you can do. And then the other thing you can do that was mentioned earlier is you can purchase lead lists from us or company lists from us, which we do enhance with firmographic information as well as contact information if you need a list of suppliers, say, in bulk.

Jannine

Thank you. Another question we got. What are teams typically missing when they rely on maritime-only trade data?

Carolyn

Well, I think one of the things that surprises me, I've been in this industry for probably 10 or
15 years, I'm consistently surprised by the number of people that don't realize that the U.S. import data is maritime-only. And most people, I think one of the things that's perhaps confusing for people that are in the industry versus people trying to use the data, it's normal for us to think about data in terms of markets. You sit in the U.S., you run a business in the U.S., you are focused on the United States market. On our side, we source the data, we buy this data, we integrate this data, we work with this data, we really think about things like datasets. We're working hard to change that framing. And we want to help illuminate for you all the market that is the United States, which is really, if we're going to be as complete as possible, we're going to talk about the summation of U.S. maritime imports, plus Mexico truck and rail exports to the United States, to even the next biggest thing, which is U.S. air shipments, which right now are virtually invisible unless you have Indian trade data and some of these random places where this comes from. And to that end, we are always working to provide greater transparency in trade. We have been campaigning the government for years in the United States to increase trade transparency. And hopefully with a bill that's before Congress this session, we will be able to enact into law the
ability to actually get maritime air and truck data from the United States. So hopefully all of these things will lead to greater and greater pictures. But again, I think it's actually the mistake that most people, when they buy U.S. import data, they think they're getting all U.S. imports when in fact they're only getting all maritime imports.

Jannine

Thank you. I've had a couple questions about pricing. We can share a little bit about that here. But what I do recommend is that you book a meeting with us using the demo link or the chat link that I provided here, because you can talk through what options are good for you. And if you have additional users, there's so many different options and what we can speak to. But Carolyn, one of the specific questions that came in was, how does access to Mexico, all modes data access work? And is pricing based on specific number of HS codes or is it all access regardless of the number of HS codes? And is there API access? I realize there's a lot of questions in there. Maybe you could just touch on that overall.

Carolyn

Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, our platform is designed to be, you know, you sign in and you can search and you get everything. You know, that's how it works. This data set in particular, because of the richness of the data and because of the way our system works, we only sell this data on an annual plan. The reason we only sell this data on an annual plan is we've just spent all of this time going over how it is itemized. All of our monthly plans to prevent, you can sign up online and get those to prevent people from coming in and scraping and downloading all of our data, have pretty limited downloads. When you are on our annual plan, you're working with myself or someone on my team, and you get a lot
more downloads because again, we want you to be able to get insights, get value, and it's very likely when you're using this data set, you're going to need a lot more records because the data is itemized and it’s not shipment level. So, first and foremost, you know, it is annual only, but um you know, that’s really important to make because it’s just it’s very valuable and you are going to need more downloads to be able to use this. Um we do offer the data in bulk. We offer the data via API. Um so, we have a number of ways of kind of delivering this to you, but again, annually is the key here.

Jannine

Okay, we got another question, Stating, I think the US companies can submit vessel confidentiality request to CBP to hide shipment data. Is there a similar mechanism in Mexico? And if so, how can we tell whether we’re seeing the full market picture versus companies that may be hiding their import or export information?

Carolyn

Yeah, this is a great question. Um, I first want to cover manifest confidentiality in the United States. So, it is true that US based importers can submit up to five name variant spellings of their name and CBP will remove them from the data. I want to stress that this is a very imprecise system. So, um, they let you submit name variant spellings, but they are looking for exact matches. So, if you have or you use a lot of different imported or you’re a very large company, you probably have many different spellings of your name. Um, I’m going to try not call out companies, but I will call out a company here as an example. If you think about a company like Walmart, Walmart is enormous. They work with lots of suppliers. They bring in all kinds of stuff, and they also have a very distributed distribution system. They can ship things directly to any one of their super centers. They have warehouse all over the country. They have subsidiaries like Sam’s Club. Um, and its virtually impossible for a company of that size and that magnitude to  hide all of those shipments. They can hide some, but you are still going to end up seeing quite a lot. Uh, the last point to make on the manifest confidentiality  in the US data is it affects about 12% of all , 12 to 14% of all US imports over time. So, um, it is there. It’s by not any means  the majority of records for some of the reasons that I’ve mentioned. Um, and that number’s held steady for the last 10 years. In the US data, you can see this because both the way that the records look um the shipper name, the shipper address, the consigne name and the consign address are all null. The rest of the data comes through. Um, if if the shipments are not subject to manifest confidentiality, you'll see shipper and shipper address, consigning and consigning address in the Mexico data. The good news is there is no notion of manifest confidentiality. So you don't have to worry about that. That doesn't mean that the fill rate is 100%. But the fill rate is um pretty high on all of these all of these fields and you should be able to to see the details you need to see.

Jannine

Good to know. Thank you. Uh I love this next question from Fernando. My company was your, was your customer until 2022. Please let me know what improvements have that you've made um since then on this data set like on Mexico maritime I need to have more accurate and fresh data.

Carolyn

Yeah. Well, uh, you know, I think the biggest difference is we now have this, um, this data set and specifically for folks who are using maritime, um, even if you only still need Mexico, this data is much more detailed, it’s updated much quicker. And I I think the key thing um which we've seen from a number of folks that I've talked to is people who are looking at specific products and specific companies are actually able to find brand names of products of chemicals of car parts in the data which you were never able to do in the Mexico Maritime data because the Mexico maritime data the product description was actually just a description of the HS code. So it's much much more detailed. You're getting it faster. Um even the attributes you have around the HS code as well as the tariff regimes are much more detailed as well. So the data itself has just kind of improved by leaps and leaps and bounds since 2022.

Jannine

I have a question for you Carolyn.

Carolyn

Sure.

Jannine

Um, if you were a sourcing or procurement leader, if you are, so I know we have a few on this call, where would you personally um like where would they get the most value from this?

Carolyn

Um, well, I would say two key things. Uh, you know, first and foremost, there's finding new suppliers, staying on top of that. You could certainly search by HS code and by product and understand, you know, who are players um that are sending the products that you're making into the US or whatever country you're working with um or working from that are based in Mexico. Um but the other key thing that a lot of procurement people are expected and asked to do is understand the market, understand their competitors. Um what are your competitors buying from Mexico? Are you behind the curve on this or are you ahead? Um, you know, you certainly don't want to be caught, you know, caught with your proverbial pants down uh at some kind of leadership meeting because you were only looking at maritime data and you missed the boat that all of this manufacturing is happening in Mexico when you have the chance to, you know, not only get some detail but get a huge amount of detail on on what exactly is happening and how these how these goods move back and forth across the border.

Jannine

Thank you. What is the biggest misconception people have about Mexico trade data today?

Carolyn

Well, I you know, I don't know if I I'm not sure I can say it's true for this group. I imagine this is probably a pretty well- educated um informed group, particularly about Mexico. But I, you know, part of why I wanted to spend a bunch of time talking about the US Mexico trade relationship is, you know, I think a lot of us for a long time have heard about China, China, China, China, and how dominant China has been in trade. And I I think it's really significant. Um and and maybe when all of us weren't looking or some number of us weren't looking, you know, Mexico has slipped into the lead spot and because of the trade relationships we have because of uh the now very old NAFTA, but USMCA and and these strong uh North American trade relationships, you know, Mexico has really um continued to become an important trading partner. And we just see this, I mean, I'll even go back to this slide. I mean, the growth of Mexico trade over time is is really an impressive and incredible story.

Jannine

Okay. Um, we probably have time for one more question. Uh, I know you've answered several. Um, so if anyone has.. Oh, if anyone has a question, please feel free to pop it in here.

Carolyn

I love an interactive webinar.

Jannine

I know this is so interactive. Unlike uh our past ones, this one's this one's a nice one where we're just sort of taking everyone's questions and maybe going a bit over time, but that's okay. Um I do have a follow-up question. I know um you know there's been so much information you've shared today. So perhaps if you know you could leave people with sort of the one key takeaway, if you could leave one thing for our audience to take away from today's session, what would that be?

Carolyn

I honestly would say to most people um I would really encourage you guys to try the data. Take a look at it. Um book a session with one of our sales reps. You will be amazed what you can see. Look at your specific industry, your products um and see what you find here. It's really um it's really staggering. I, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of people and I get to see people surprise and delight at how much information they can see in this data.

Jannine

All right. Um thank you so much for your time, Carolyn. This was super helpful. And thank you everyone for your amazing questions. Um what I'd like Oh, one last question came up. Um, let's let's answer this one last question and then we’ll end it. Um, I also wanted to say if you have questions about pricing, um, or you want to book a meeting, feel free to book a meeting right here. I just sent the link again. I will be sending a recording of today's webinar to everybody. So, you can just reply to me if you'd like to ask more questions about pricing and I'll set you up with someone on our team. Um, okay. Oh, and I also wanted to mention the manifest issue. That's our newsletter that comes out every two weeks. Um, there's one coming out in the next day or two and it is all about the details of Mexico all modes data. So, definitely uh take a read um if you're not signed up to it, you can access it um in the resource section of our website importgenius.com. You can sign up there. Um, okay. The question is, do you have historical data on pricing of a specific item with an HS code?

Carolyn

Yeah. So, this data uh I should know this off off the top of my head, but we do, I believe, have 5 years of history for the Mexico Maritime data. So, you’re able sorry the Mexico all modes data. So, you're able to go back and look at HS codes and track what the price of those HS codes has been over time, even from specific companies.

Jannine

That's good to know. Uh, thank you everybody. Uh, and I wish you a wonderful rest of the week and we'll see you at our next webinar. Take care. Bye.

Carolyn

Thank you all.