Just recently I learned that in 2007, out of a sample of 198,081 exporting firms (there were 268,526 identified exporters that year), 81.1 percent of the total export value by Hispanic-owned firms within this sample was accounted for by trade with Latin American countries. For nonminority-owned firms, trade with Latin American countries was only 15.1 percent of the total export value. A similar trend can be found in this sample for Asian-owned firms and export trade with Pacific Rim countries.

These statistics on minority-owned exporting firms are straight out of the “Ownership Characteristics of Classifiable U.S. Exporting Firms: 2007” report. This report is a product of the combined data in the 2007 Profile of U.S. Exporting Companies (the Profile) and the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO), the latter of which is conducted every five years as part of the Economic Census. Joining the information in this survey to the Profile allows for exporting firms to be detailed by four additional characteristics that are not in the Profile, namely gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status. The “Classifiable” firms that the title of the report refers to are non-farming firms that are not publicly owned and are also in-scope for the SBO.

Here are a few quick statistics on classifiable firms versus all firms:

• The report sample includes 198,081 of the 268,526 identified exporters in 2007
• 163,419 of the firms in this sample are classifiable firms
• Classifiable exporters account for 82.5% of identified exporters in 2007 and 17.6% of the total known export value for 2007
• Classifiable exporters account for only 0.6% of all classifiable firms in the U.S. in 2007
• Average receipts for classifiable exporting firms in 2007 were $16.8 million, whereas average receipts were $313,689 for classifiable non-exporting firms

The report, which you can find a link to below, largely focuses on how exporting firms within the categories of these four company characteristics perform compared to their non-exporting counterparts. There is an interesting highlights section that contains some of the statistics I referenced here, and plenty more. You’ll also be able to look at the data tables, which detail exporting and non-exporting firms by all categories of the four company characteristics from the SBO, as well as company size and export-destination information from the Profile.