How to find buyers for your export product (without guessing)

Most advice on finding export buyers is the same list: go to trade fairs, join B2B marketplaces, hire an agent, ask your embassy. All of it works eventually. None of it tells you the one thing that would save you a year — which specific companies already buy what you make.

That information exists. Every time goods cross a border, a customs declaration records the importing company, the product code and the origin. In most of Latin America those records are public. The problem is that they are published as raw microdata, in fixed-width text files of several gigabytes per month, with no company contact details attached.

Start from the product code, not the country

The mistake most exporters make is choosing a market first — "we want to enter Mexico" — and then looking for buyers. Reverse it. Take your HS code, the six-digit tariff classification your freight forwarder already uses on every shipment, and ask how many companies import that exact code in each market.

The answer is rarely what people expect. A category that looks small nationally can have hundreds of active buyers, and a category that looks huge can be concentrated in four distributors who will never take a new supplier.

Across Mexico, Brazil and Argentina we track 282,369 importing companies with a working phone or email on file, indexed against 5,314 six-digit product codes. For industrial valves under HS 8481.80, for example, that is 454 companies in Mexico, 1,084 in Brazil and 207 in Argentina — each one a company that has actually cleared that product through customs, not a company that might be interested.

The three questions worth asking

Who is buying it now? The base list. Useful, but everyone with the same data has it.

Who started buying it recently? Far more useful. A company that entered a category this year has not settled on a supplier. In Mexico and Argentina we can identify those: of the 454 Mexican valve importers, 23 began importing during 2026.

Who are they buying it from today? The most useful of the three, and the one almost nobody asks. If 5,589 Mexican companies source electrical connectors from China, a European manufacturer does not need to create demand — it needs to displace an incumbent. That is a different sales conversation, and a much shorter one.

What customs data will not tell you

Be clear about the limits before you build a plan on it.

It does not tell you volumes per buyer in every market, it does not tell you the price they pay, and it does not tell you whether the buyer is happy with their current supplier. It tells you who is in the market, at what scale, and where their goods come from. That is enough to build a target list and not much more.

It is also not current everywhere. Brazil's product-level trade series has not been updated since 2021 — the company register and contact data are current, but what each company imports is four years old. Anyone selling you Brazilian product-level data as fresh is either mistaken or counting on you not to check.

A method that works

1. Pull your HS6. It is on every commercial invoice you have ever issued.
2. Count the market before you pick it. Reachable buyers matters more than total buyers. A market with 1,000 companies and no contact data is worth less than one with 200 you can call.
3. Separate new entrants from incumbents. They need different emails.
4. Check who supplies them. If your competitors are already there, that is validation, not a reason to stop.
5. Verify before you ship. A registered importer with current licences and no active sanctions is a different risk from a company that appears in the data once.

None of this requires a subscription to anything. The customs data is public. What takes time is turning several gigabytes of monthly microdata into a list with names, product codes and contact details — which is what we do.

Related

• Market entry research: what it costs, and what it cannot tell you
• Panjiva, ImportGenius and ImportYeti: what they do, and what they don't
• 5,589 Mexican companies buy electrical connectors from China
• Nearshoring: who in Mexico can actually supply you