On The Processing Of User Demand Oriented Foreign Trade Competitive Intelligence

As China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), foreign trade developed rapidly and the trade amount doubled in a short time. Meanwhile, we must admit that the foreign trade based industries have not developed well in China because most of the industries export mainly in labor-intensive products, the processing trade industry makes a great proportion and thus, the added-values are low. The result is, the exporting industries are subject to international industry regulations and importing regulations. So, China is not a power trade country, though one of the main trading countries in the world. Trade protecting measures are greatly diversified. Besides anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguards, measures like intelligence property protections, green barriers, technical barriers and labor standards are commonly used by other countries, especially the developed countries which made Chinese enterprises suffered a lot in international trades. Make things even worse, the situation is becoming even more severe as the exporting amount develops fast. Intelligence on foreign trades is abundant, and we are short of proper means to acquire and make full use of the intelligence available. Actions are rarely taken actively and timely to avoid loss. Thus, this article targets mainly on the processing of varies trade intelligence and providing consulting for enterprises on international trades.The article begins with the analysis of intelligence demands of foreign trade enterprises on the contents and patterns and pointed out that for enterprises on foreign trades, intelligence on competitive environments and rivals should be inspected. And because of the differences on the scale of enterprise and competitive power of their products, there might be different preferences on the contents and patterns on competitive intelligence and followed by classified discussions on different types. Then the article goes to the collecting of intelligence. As the basis of the processing and utilization of foreign trade competitive intelligence, intelligence sources should be found properly. Several main foreign trade intelligence sources, as main publications, websites, statistics and databases of special agents are discussed and analyzed for their respective advantages and disadvantages and provided the basis of utilization of intelligence sources timely and efficiently. Meanwhile, new trade competitive intelligence sources are explored. After that, collecting means and techniques are analyzed and discussed according to their respective features. In the latter part, processing techniques and means are discussed. Because that the contents of competitive intelligence are diversified and complicated, today's classification of foreign trade competitive intelligence are not definite in expatiating and classifying and that may cause some redundances and pretermissions. This article suggested that a new, more complete and reliable classification system should be set up to include complete intelligence sources that are useable for foreign trade enterprises. On specific intelligence processing techniques, competitive intelligence was divided into three types: structured, unstructured and half-structured, and discussion was done respectively.One innovation of this article is on the research and discussion of answering-up theories to trade conflicts. Previously, researches and settlements on trade conflicts are done after the conflicts, a more positive way is to do the pre-warning before the conflicts happen. By the inspecting of some certain indexes, forecasts and judgments are provided for possible trade conflicts and early actions might be taken to avoid danger. The other innovation is on the practical processing work of foreign trade related competitive intelligence. Foreign trade competitive intelligence is divided into different kinds and different processing means are taken respectively. The result is, the processing problems of abundant foreign trade competitive intelligence are resolved methodologically and utilizations are provided to enterprises.