The U.S. Census Bureau recently released A Profile of U.S. Importing and Exporting Companies, 2014-2015.

Regularly, we release data like the U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services – Annual Revision for 2016 that discusses what is being exported or imported and how much. The A Profile of U.S. Importing and Exporting Companies, 2014-2015 differs from those statistics in that it details not what, but who is doing the exporting and importing, but only of goods, not services. That is not to say that the profile can tell you if the neighbor down the street imports thousands of dollars’ worth of knock-off sunglasses, but it can tell you information including, but not limited to:

• Types of companies who are exporting or importing goods.
• Domestic locations where companies are concentrated.
• Countries that companies trade with.
• Size of companies that export and import.

The following is a visualization created with data from Exhibit 6 of the profile. It shows the top five states for exports by Known Value, which is the value of export transactions that we were able to attribute to specific companies (nearly 90 percent of the total annual export value). Also shown is the number of companies in those states split into two categories: small and medium (SME) and large.

The data used in the profile is compiled from administrative records containing information from the Internal Revenue Service and past economic censuses. More Information about this process is available in the technical documentation at the end of the report.

For more information, contact the Economic Statistical Methods Division at (301) 763-3629.

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