Industry specific Multi HS4s analysis
Seeing the whole picture, not just one HS4 code
A rare capability in trade statistics
Most trade data platforms, and certainly raw government customs data, are built around single HS4 codes. If you want to understand a whole category (meat, energy, electronics components), you're normally forced into an unpleasant choice:
Use the HS2 chapter level, which is far too broad and pulls in unrelated products, or manually search, download and merge multiple HS4 files yourself in Excel. Its too complex, and take far too much time.
JapanTradeStatistics.com has already solved this already, not as a future promise, but as a live feature covering multiple industries. We combine related HS4 codes into a single file and a single chart, so you see the full category in one place instead of piecing it together yourself.
Two ways to get it
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Industry-wise packages, Pre-built files covering a standard industry grouping (for example, the meat industry file, which contains 19 HS4 codes including beef, pork, chicken, sausages and fats).
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Your own custom combination. Select exactly the HS4 codes that matter to your business, regardless of which chapter they officially belong to. Build your own "basket", a competitor set, a raw-material group, a product line you track, that no standard government classification would ever group together on its own.
Custom combinations naturally take more work to prepare than a standard industry package, so pricing reflects that: the more individualized your selection, the higher the cost. Pre-built industry files remain the more affordable, ready-to-go option.
Why having multiple HS4s in one file and one chart actually matters
This isn't just a convenience, it changes what kind of analysis is possible at all:
Substitution effects become visible.
When the price of one product rises, buyers often shift to a close substitute, chilled beef losing ground to frozen beef, or pork gaining share as beef prices climb. That shift is invisible if each product sits in its own separate file; it only becomes visible when you can watch several related codes move against each other on the same chart, in real time.
True category size, not a chapter-level guess
HS2-level data for meat for instanace, pulls in offal, poultry, and other products you never intended to include. A custom or industry-specific HS4 grouping gives you the actual market size for the category you care about, not an inflated or distorted approximation.
You stop rebuilding the same Excel merge every month
Anyone doing this manually today is repeating the same search-download-merge cycle every time the data updates. A standing multi-HS4 file removes that recurring task entirely, the comparison exists permanently, and updates on its own.
Cross-product competitive analysis becomes possible
Suppliers rarely compete against just one HS4 code, a beef exporter is really competing against pork, poultry and even plant-based substitutes for share of Japanese demand. Multi-HS4 files let you build the file around your actual competitive landscape, not around a government classification that has nothing to do with how the market actually behaves.
Category-level trends emerge that single codes hide
A single HS4 might look flat or in decline on its own, while the broader category it belongs to is actually growing, the volume simply moved to a related code. You only catch this by watching the codes together.
It surfaces analysis that's normally reserved for those with the resources to build it themselves
Large trading companies and research divisions have long been able to hand this kind of custom, multi-code data merging to an analyst team. Multi-HS4 files bring that same capability to businesses that don't have a dedicated data team to build and maintain it in-house. For large trading houses, now they can get much more easy to understand data in no time, without involving another department but simply at your desktop, and instantlly.
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