Methodology
How the record is built: sources, cross-check and limits.
A document of VS·Trade, a brand of VS-Trade Intelligence Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17200549. Last updated: October 2026. Translation of the Spanish original, which prevails.
In force from 5 October 2026 · version 1.1
This is a translation of the Spanish original. If the two versions differ, the Spanish version prevails.
This page explains how what we sell is built. We publish it in full because the rigour of the method is the product, and because a buyer has the right to know what they are buying before paying for it.
What we do
VS-Trade is a foreign-trade research firm. We compile and analyse information from lawfully obtained sources, including public registers, third-party data providers under licence and our own analytical research.
We do not redistribute raw datasets. What we deliver is the result of a cross-check and an analysis: the reconciliation between different registers, the resolution of corporate identities, the calculation of relative positions and the detection of changes between periods. That work is ours, and it is what is licensed.
How a figure is built
1. Reconciliation of registers. The same operation appears in several registers with different levels of detail. Cross-checking them carelessly inflates or distorts the totals: a record with several invoices multiplies the goods lines if they are joined by the document number. Our procedure joins each piece by its full key and checks, for each report, that the input total is identical to the output total.
2. Identity resolution. The same company appears written in many ways —with and without accents, with and without spaces, with a different corporate suffix, truncated by the length of the field. We have seen up to twenty-seven variants of a single company name. Merging them wrongly produces the worst possible error: telling a market leader that it has disappeared. Variants are consolidated, and the number of merged variants is reported alongside the figure.
3. Reading what is declared, not what is estimated. When a value is declared in the register —a rate, an agreement invoked, a certificate issuer— we read it. We do not reconstruct it by dividing amounts, because that reconstruction carries over the error of the denominators and produces impossible results.
4. Declared window. Every figure is published with its time window, its filter and its valuation criterion. A number without a window is not a number.
5. Declared coverage. Where the register does not identify one of the parties, the figure says so instead of hiding it. We prefer a report that shows its own gap to one that appears to be complete.
What we always exclude
- Operators who are natural persons. When the importer or exporter is a natural person and not a company, they are left out of the named analysis: neither their name nor their identifier appears in any deliverable.
- Companies that asked to be removed. Any company can ask to be excluded from our named analyses, free of charge and without having to explain why. See Data removal.
- Personal contact details. We do not include personal e-mail addresses, private mobile phone numbers or home addresses of individuals.
Professional contact details of companies
So that the report can be used to write to someone, it includes, where it could be verified, the professional contact details of the companies analysed: website, company phone number, general mailboxes and the name, position and corporate e-mail of whoever manages purchasing or imports. They come from what the company itself publishes, from public registers and from professional directories, and each item states what supports it and whether it is verified or only declared.
This is information about the person in their role within the company, not about their private life. Anyone who appears can ask for it to be removed or corrected, free of charge and without explaining why, by writing to [email protected]. See Data removal.
What we do not claim
We do not claim to hold anyone's file, nor access to confidential information from any authority, nor knowledge of a company's operations beyond what the analysis allows us to infer. What we deliver is our reading of cross-checked registers, and it may contain errors. If a client finds a discrepancy between our analysis and its own books, we correct it and review the method.
Updates
Reports under subscription are updated with one release closed per month. The sources publish with a lag of fifteen to thirty days depending on the source; to that we add the cross-check and the verification, so a month's release is published within sixty days of its close. Where the source publishes data between releases (today Mexico and Ecuador), an interim update gathers what has already come in. Each update states what changed compared with the previous one and whether any change comes from a correction of method rather than a real movement in the market.
Destination countries and since when
Each report states which destination countries it covers and from what date each one's register starts, because it is not the same: Dominican Republic since 2021, Colombia since 2023, Mexico since 2024, Ecuador since 2025 (without March–December 2024 in the source). Where the register does not name the supplier —Ecuador—, the winery is attributed by the brand, the e-mail domain or the address declared, and the report quantifies what share of the value rests on each indicator.
Professional contact: what is published and why
The report includes, for the companies analysed, the name and position of whoever manages their purchasing and their company e-mail, when it could be verified. These are contact details linked to the role that person holds in a company, not data about their private life: never their identity document, personal e-mail, private phone number or home address. When the e-mail is not verified, we say so; when it was inferred from a pattern, it is not published. Anyone can ask for their name to be removed by writing to [email protected].
Anything unclear? Write to [email protected].