Platts Market Data - Shipping

S&P Global Energy/Platts Market Data - Shipping is a Supply Chain & Shipping data product listed on Snowflake Marketplace and indexed by The Alternative Data Encyclopedia.

S&P Global Energy publishes Platts Market Data - Shipping as a Snowflake Marketplace offering in the Supply Chain & Shipping signal family.

The data

Comprehensive cross-commodity, global freight rates and marine fuel price assessments

It is one of 81 listings in the Supply Chain & Shipping family; between them the practical differences come down to coverage, history depth and how the raw signal is cleaned and delivered.

The source tags it with energy.

Structure, access and licensing

Last updated: 2026-08-11. Pricing: Free (Snowflake Marketplace).

Access is through a dataset that is delivered as a secure Snowflake data share you can query in place. Its most recent recorded snapshot is from 2026-08-11.

The signal

Customs manifests, bills of lading and official trade statistics describing what physically crosses borders, by shipper, consignee, product and vessel. The category turns public filings and commercial aggregation into a near-real-time map of global goods flows.

Shipment arrivals lead reported revenue for importers and exporters by weeks to months, making trade flows an early read on company fundamentals. Analysts detect sourcing shifts between countries ahead of disclosures, estimate inventory build or destocking, and screen for sanctions evasion or forced-labor exposure. During tariff shocks, front-loading and rerouting show up in manifests well before macro statistics are revised. Ocean bills of lading expose exporter, importer, container counts, commodity descriptions, ports and dates; customs statistics add Harmonized System codes and values at country level. Derived products include supplier-switch detection, import volume growth by company before quarterly reporting, transshipment anomalies and tariff-exposure estimates.

US ocean manifest records enter the public domain through Customs and Border Protection, where vendors aggregate, clean and entity-resolve them at scale; other jurisdictions release country- or firm-level customs aggregates with varying lag. Providers link shippers to corporate hierarchies, classify free-text cargo descriptions into product taxonomies, and deliver search platforms, alerts and APIs. Quant teams combine flows with satellite port activity and freight rates to validate coverage.

Caveats and compliance

Coverage is structurally partial: many countries publish only aggregates and some suppress firm identities for confidentiality. Free-text cargo descriptions force noisy classification, and transshipment hubs obscure true origin. Front-running around announced tariffs can invert short-horizon relationships between shipments and demand.

Bills of lading are public records in the United States, so privacy constraints are minimal, but several governments restrict re-dissemination of their customs data and vendors must honor those licenses. Sanctions and export-control screening obligations apply when the same datasets are used for counterparty due diligence.

Who uses this signal

Equity analysts tracking importers, retailers and industrials use shipment growth as a revenue proxy; supply-chain and procurement teams map supplier networks; compliance and government users screen sanctions, tariffs and counterfeit flows. Macro funds follow containerized trade as a coincident indicator of world demand.

Complementary signals

This kind of signal pairs naturally with adjacent categories of the encyclopedia:

Further reading