Comex Stat Brazil: how to search export and import data to find a market

Leendert van Delft

Vice-President Global Sales Programs, (Digital) Marketing and Global E-commerce

October 22, 2026 7 min read

Comex Stat is the free system run by Brazil's Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services (MDIC) that holds the official statistics on Brazil's exports and imports since 1997. You can filter by product (NCM code), country, state, transport mode and period, and see the dollar value, weight and quantity of each flow.

Whether you are a Brazilian manufacturer looking for buyers or a foreign company checking Brazil as a supplier, the problem is rarely a lack of data. It is knowing where the data sits and how to read it. Before paying for trade fairs, trips or samples, you can find out in an afternoon which countries already buy a product from Brazil, what they pay per kilo and whether demand is rising or falling.

What is Comex Stat and where does the data come from?

Comex Stat is the official tool for querying and extracting Brazil's foreign trade statistics, maintained by MDIC's Foreign Trade Secretariat (Secex). The figures come from declarations filed in Siscomex, Brazil's foreign trade system: every export and import becomes a line in the database, aggregated by product, country and month.

The main database runs from January 1997 to the latest complete month. Data for 1989 to 1996 sits in a separate historical section, under an older nomenclature (NBM), so it does not mix with the NCM series. When checked on 21 October 2026, the latest update was dated 6 October, covering September. Source: Comex Stat API and documentation, MDIC.

Comex Stat and Siscomex are not the same thing. Siscomex is where a company files the transaction; Comex Stat is where the government publishes the aggregated result, without identifying any company.

Which filters and metrics does Comex Stat offer?

The general query lets you combine filters and breakdowns in a single search. The table shows the most useful ones for market research and what each is for.

Breakdown	What it shows	What it is useful for
NCM (8 digits)	The exact product	Seeing who buys your item
HS4 or HS6	Harmonized System product group	Comparing with other countries' data
Countries and blocs	Export destination or import origin	Choosing a market
State of the product	Brazilian state where the goods come from	Seeing who already exports from your region
Transport mode	Sea, air, road and others	Understanding how the product travels
URF	Customs unit where the cargo left or entered	Mapping the ports and airports in use

The metrics are FOB value in US dollars, net weight in kilograms and statistical quantity, which depends on the NCM (units, pairs, litres). Imports also show freight, insurance and CIF value, which do not exist for exports.

There is also a query by municipality, at a higher level of aggregation: it only breaks products down to HS4 and assigns each transaction to the declarant's municipality, not the producer's. A trading company in Santos exporting coffee grown in Minas Gerais shows up in Santos.

How do you search Comex Stat, step by step?

The routine below works for any product. As an example, take a honey producer who wants to know where Brazilian natural honey, NCM 0409.00.00, is already sold.

Go to comexstat.mdic.gov.br and open the general query.
Choose the flow: exports.
Set the period. For trends, take at least the last five complete years and choose the yearly view.
Filter by the product's NCM. If you do not know the code yet, sort it out first with our guide to the NCM code in Brazil, because the wrong code returns the wrong market.
Under breakdown, choose Countries. To see domestic competition, add the state of the product.
Tick the FOB value and net kilogram metrics.
Run the query and download the table to work on in a spreadsheet.

Switching the flow to imports shows the other side. That helps resellers and foreign suppliers: it shows where Brazil already buys the product and at what price it lands.

How do you read the results to choose a destination?

The most useful number for a decision is not on screen: it is the average price per kilo, which you get by dividing FOB value by net weight. It shows whether a country pays for value or buys cheap commodities.

An example with official data shows why looking at value alone misleads. According to the MDIC series, Brazil exported US$14.87 billion of coffee in 2025, 31.1% more than in 2024. Volume, however, fell 18.0%, and the average price per tonne rose 60.0%. Anyone reading only the value would conclude that demand boomed; what rose was the price.

For each candidate country, check four things in your spreadsheet:

Trend: are value and weight growing or shrinking over five years?
Average price per kilo: is it above or below other destinations?
Consistency: does the country buy every year, or appear one year and vanish the next?
Transport mode: if the product already flies to that destination, there is demand for small, urgent lots.

A country with a small value that grows every year and pays above average is often a better target for a small business than the biggest buyer, where price is set by large contracts. For the national picture, see Brazil's main exports.

Which mistakes distort the research?

The most common mistake is comparing years in which the NCM changed. When the Harmonized System is revised, codes are split, merged or deleted, and the product's series can show a jump that is classification, not market. If the curve jumps oddly, check whether the code existed in earlier years.

Other frequent slips:

Reading the state of the product as the exporter's address.
Comparing export FOB values with import CIF values, which include freight and insurance.
Treating the current month as closed. Preliminary data is revised in the consolidated release.
Forgetting that Comex Stat only covers Brazil's trade. To see how much a country imports from the whole world, you need another database, such as the UN's.

Does Comex Stat have ready-made dashboards and an API?

It has both. Comex Vis, also from MDIC, offers ready-made visualisations of the same data, good for a first look without building a query. For automation, the Comex Stat API is open and returns the same filters and metrics as the screen, so you can build an internal dashboard that updates every month.

Frequently asked questions about Comex Stat

Yes. Queries, downloads and the API are public and free, maintained by MDIC's Secex.

No. The statistics are aggregated and do not identify exporters or importers.

Once a month, with the previous month's data, in the first days of the following month. The date of the latest update is shown in the system.

FOB is the value of the goods loaded on board, without international freight and insurance. CIF adds freight and insurance, and in Comex Stat it only exists for imports.

As a starting point, yes, because it shows which countries already buy the product from Brazil. For direct-to-consumer sales, combine it with the criteria in our guide to finding your e-commerce market.

Sources

MDIC: Comex Stat
MDIC: Comex Stat API documentation
MDIC/Secex: Brazilian foreign trade results, consolidated data (updated 6 Oct 2026)

Turn the spreadsheet into a first shipment

The research ends in a short list of two or three countries. The next step is to talk to buyers in those markets and send samples, with the operation set up as described in our guide to exporting from Brazil.

When the first sample is ready to go, open a DHL Express business account and have your international shipping ready for the first order.

Open a DHL Express Business account