Is anyone buying, abroad and at home?

Every figure is import tonnage arriving at that country's ports, summed across all of them, compared against two baselines: the three weeks before the latest week, and the country's 2024 daily average. The larger gap sets the score, the same rule used across the rest of the site.

Direction is treated asymmetrically here, and the opposite way round from the sea lanes. A market importing less than usual is the risk, because that is demand softening. A market importing more is good news for an exporter, so an upswing is capped and never reads as disrupted.

The domain score is weighted by how much of India's exports each market takes, so a slowdown in the United States or the UAE moves it far more than one in South Africa.

Two honest limits on the export half. This is total import tonnage, not your product: a country can be importing less crude while buying more garments. And it is arrival data, so it reflects orders placed weeks or months ago. Read it as confirmation that demand has already shifted, not as advance warning that it is about to.

The domestic half works differently. In a growing economy these numbers essentially never fall, so waiting for a decline means waiting for a crisis. What signals a slowdown is growth dropping below its usual pace: GST rising 4% where it normally rises 10% is a real loss of momentum even though the number went up. Six points short of normal scores 50. India publishes no open statistics API for any of this, so the figures are entered by hand from the monthly releases.

One caveat on GST in particular. Collections rise partly because compliance and formalisation improve, not only because people buy more. The domestic-transactions line is the cleaner read, since it strips out imports, which have lately grown far faster than domestic activity.