US Electronics Trade Data by Port

"Electronics" inside these records is a commodity code, not an industry label: chapter 85 of the Harmonized System, electrical machinery and equipment - semiconductors and integrated circuits (HS 8542), diodes and transistors (HS 8541), batteries, printed circuits, consumer hardware. "By port" means the row carries geography finer than the national total: the customs district where goods cleared Customs, and on the broadest record the named customs port itself, beside state and metropolitan-area cuts.

Depth and breadth are complements, not substitutes. Every one of the three arrives through Datadory as typed rows on the same join keys - commodity code, geography, period - delivered daily, weekly, or hourly, so a dashboard built on one absorbs the others without a reshaping project.

Start with the International Trade Data Hub when the question is where. It is the only record in the eight-primary EMS pool that reaches true customs-port geography, and it does so beside state and metropolitan-area detail on the same cube. Ports run from 2003 in the interactive family and 2013 in the machine-readable one - enough history to compare an entry point's electronics volumes across two decades of supply-chain shifts, or to settle whether a reshoring claim shows up in Gulf Coast gateways before it shows up in national totals. It scores 8/10 on Datadory's rubric, carried by history length and the rarity of metro-level trade detail.

Reach for the two HS-coded Census time series when the question is what exactly. They cannot name the port, but they drill commodity detail to the ten-digit line - fine enough to isolate semiconductor diodes rated under half an ampere - and they cross it with customs district, partner country and transport mode every month. Both score 9/10, carried by documentation discipline, identifier density and the length of the monthly history.

The practical split: hub for geography-first questions, HS series for commodity-first ones. Most real analyses want both, and because every record keys on commodity code plus geography plus period, joins are arithmetic rather than archaeology.

It depends which surface you stand on: 1987 for national monthly and annual totals, 2003 for named customs ports through the interactive family, 2013 for ports through the machine-readable family, and January 2010 for the district-by-partner monthlies behind both HS-coded series. Each layer answers a different comparison window, and the layers stack without restatement because the classification ladder runs two-digit chapter through ten-digit line on every one.

For domestic context there is Census M3 - Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories & Orders (quality 9): value of shipments, new orders, unfilled orders and inventories down to NAICS 334 Computer and Electronic Products, roughly 600,000 rows reaching back to January 1992 - but its geography stops at the United States total. Treat it as the demand cycle that explains what moves through the ports, never as a port-level record itself.

The export side carries no CIF and no duty, by design. Instead it ships value, two quantity measures in declared units, shipping weights split by vessel, air and containerized mode, and transaction card counts - forty-one documented variables against the import record's seventy. Weight and mode answer the routing question directly: which electronics commodities clear which districts, by which mode - exactly the read a logistics planner wants before committing capacity to a corridor.

Both directions flag detail rows separately from country-group rollups, and both carry true-zero indicators so a genuine zero never masquerades as a withheld figure. The table below compresses the whole stack.

Row shapes exactly as the records return them - figures shown are the field dictionaries' own example values, fixed to make the shape legible:

# Imports by HS Code -- one district-commodity-country-month cell
period           : 2025-06     COMM_LVL : HS6
commodity        : 854110      Electrical machinery and equipment
partner          : CTY_CODE 5700   China
district         : DIST_NAME Los Angeles, CA

GEN_VAL_MO       : 45,000,000 USD   GEN_VAL_YR : 400,000,000 USD
CON_VAL_MO       : 44,000,000 USD   (cleared into domestic consumption)
GEN_CIF_MO       : 46,500,000 USD   (insurance + freight bundled)
CAL_DUT_YR       : 3,200,000 USD    LAST_UPDATE : 2025-08-05

# Trade Data Hub -- one commodity-geography-period cell
classification   : HS    commodity_code : 85    period : 2026-06
trading_partner  : China
state            : California
port             : Los Angeles
balance          : <exports minus imports, Census basis>

First, geography is attribution, not observation. A district total counts goods where they cleared Customs; the port column names the gateway; neither says where components were consumed or assembled. Reading Los Angeles district electronics imports as California demand double-counts everything moving inland by rail - pair the district read with state-of-destination series before drawing a regional conclusion.

Second, valuation differs by direction. Import rows populate CIF while export rows quote FOB-style values, so the same physical shipment appears larger on the way in than on the way out; mirror comparisons need the wedge acknowledged, not averaged away.

Ranked by how directly the district-and-port grain answers the day job:

1. Supply-chain and procurement teams. Inbound chapter 85 value shifting between partners and between the gateways contract manufacturers actually clear through turns sourcing concentration from anecdote into measurement - months before a supplier review mentions it.
2. Investors and quant researchers. District-level flows lead quarterly disclosures: import penetration, export momentum and tariff-exposure screens built on columns that already separate duty, CIF and consumption measures.
3. Logistics and network planners. Transport-mode splits beside district geography show which corridors actually carry high-value low-weight electronics - evidence for capacity and routing decisions rather than hunches.
4. Trade-compliance and policy economists. Calculated duty by district and partner quantifies exposure straight from the data itself, and related-party trade flags sit in the same hub when transfer-pricing questions arrive.
5. Market researchers and journalists. Citable federal statistics with published record layouts survive review; "the busiest gateway for imported semiconductors" becomes a query, not an estimate.

Pairing the flow records with the Global Electronics Association (IPC) - Statistical Programs & EMS Intelligence closes the loop: June 2026 put North American EMS shipments up 6.7% year over year against bookings up 29.3%, with a three-month book-to-bill of 1.33 - demand context that tells you whether a district surge is cycle or trend.

Port-level flows are one workflow inside an eight-primary-dataset EMS pool. The electronic manufacturing services data guide maps the full stack - production, trade, sourcing and end-of-life - and shows where these records sit next to M3 shipments, IPC bookings signal and supplier directories. For the direct comparison of depth against breadth, the imports-by-HS-code vs trade data hub head-to-head scores them field by field.

Go straight to the records: the International Trade Data Hub, the imports series and the exports series. The wider industry view lives on the electronic manufacturing services data hub and the rankings on best electronic-manufacturing-services datasets.