Where mixers shipped in 2024, on both sides of the customs record

China's 2024 export declaration for HS 8705.40 totals 18,017 units and USD 800.26M, and it breaks into 145 partner entries whose rows add back to the world row exactly — the check that confirms no line has been counted twice. The seven largest destinations are the Russian Federation at 2,383 units, the Philippines at 1,545, Saudi Arabia at 1,279, Vietnam at 1,270, Mexico at 1,103, Algeria at 1,095 and Indonesia at 848. Those seven carry 9,523 units between them, 52.9 per cent of the total, and USD 449.77M, 56.2 per cent of the value. The top line on that ranking accounts for 13.2 per cent of units on its own. Every quantity on this side of the record is declared rather than estimated, which is not true of the importing countries' figures and is the reason the two sides are handled separately here.

The distribution has a long, thin tail that changes how the ranking should be read. Fifty-seven of the 145 entries record fewer than ten units and account for 200 units between them; twelve entries record a single unit. So a little over half of this trade moves through seven lines while roughly a third of the destination list consists of one-off shipments, and the difference between rank 30 and rank 90 is a handful of machines rather than a market structure. Three of the 145 entries are not countries at all but residual groupings — "Areas, nes" at 383 units, "Other Asia, nes" at two and "Oceania, nes" at one, 386 units in total. They are inside the 18,017 and cannot be assigned to any market, so no destination list built from this file is complete.

One thing this ranking is not is a map of demand. The partner field on an export declaration records the destination stated to Chinese customs at the time of shipment, which is a different fact from where a machine is put to work or where its buyer is registered. A trader in one country purchasing for a site in another appears here once, under whichever country the shipping documents name, and nothing in the file marks the difference. That limitation is not a defect peculiar to this heading; it is what an export declaration is. It is also the reason the ranking is presented here as a shipping map and then read against the importing countries' own records, which are compiled from the opposite end of the same shipments and by a different authority.

Twelve countries filed a 2024 world-import figure for this heading in the data used here, and they do not all mean the same thing by "quantity". Six declared it: Malaysia 16,507 units, the Philippines 2,463, Mexico 694, Peru 386, Morocco 294 and Kenya 161. Five carry a UN estimate rather than a declaration: Saudi Arabia 1,499.8, Indonesia 603.5, Algeria 412.0, Nigeria 285.9 and Thailand 54.8. Kazakhstan filed USD 16.48M with no quantity unit recorded at all, which is a missing measure and not a count of zero — the distinction matters, because a zero would be a finding and a blank is only an absence. Reported import values across the twelve total USD 372.85M; eleven rows carry a CIF value, totalling USD 325.27M, and Mexico's row carries no CIF value at all, only FOB USD 47.58M. That total is sound even where the unit counts underneath it are not, because value is declared on every one of the twelve rows.

The estimated quantities are not weak observations. They are arithmetic, and the arithmetic is visible in the file. Divide each estimated quantity into the declared value on its own row and the per-unit results collapse onto two constants: Saudi Arabia and Nigeria both land on USD 63,315 per unit, and Indonesia, Algeria and Thailand all land on USD 58,536. Those numbers are divisors, not measurements of what crossed a border. Anything built on those five unit counts is therefore a restatement of a declared value multiplied by a conversion factor, so none of the five is used here to infer a price, an average machine, a year-on-year change or a market size. They are reported because leaving them out would misrepresent how much of the import side is actually observed.

Malaysia's 16,507 is declared rather than estimated and still cannot be describing whole vehicles. Set against its own declared value of USD 23.86M it implies USD 1,445 per unit, and against its net weight of 5,158,816 kg it implies 313 kg per unit, on a heading where the median China-to-destination shipment in the same dataset is 13,617 kg per unit. The net weight on that row is itself flagged as estimated, so neither of the two cross-checks available is solid. The figure is reproduced above for completeness, because quietly omitting a declared number would be the larger distortion, but it is treated as a unit-of-measure problem and excluded from every comparison that follows. Nothing on this page ranks Malaysia, uses that quantity in a total, or reads a price or an average weight off it, and the Malaysian value line is left standing on its own.

Two tests decide whether a pair is even internally possible. The import figure covers every origin, so it must be at least as large as China's declared exports to that country; and the export figure is FOB while the import figure is CIF, so the import value should be the larger of the two. Three pairs pass both tests with a declared quantity on each side. Peru: China declares 315 units and USD 15.41M, Peru declares 386 units and USD 31.71M. Morocco: 246 and USD 16.12M against 294 and USD 22.55M. Kenya: 108 and USD 4.49M against 161 and USD 8.19M. Saudi Arabia passes both tests as well — 1,279 declared exports against 1,499.8 imported and USD 75.60M against USD 94.96M — but its import quantity is one of the five estimates, so it is a weaker pass than the other three.

Four pairs fail the first test outright, and no difference in scope can explain that direction. China declares 1,095 units to Algeria against Algeria's 412.0 from the whole world; 1,103 to Mexico against 694; 848 to Indonesia against 603.5; and 500 to Nigeria against 285.9. Thailand fails the same test by a hair, 55 declared exports against 54.8 imported, on an estimated quantity. Two more pairs fail the second test instead. The Philippines records 2,463 units and USD 46.77M CIF from all origins while China records USD 53.83M FOB into that country alone, 15 per cent above a figure that should have sat below it. Kazakhstan's USD 16.48M sits 0.5 per cent under China's USD 16.57M, the same fault in milder form: freight and insurance should have opened a visible gap and did not. Across the twelve, three pairs pass both tests on declared quantities, one passes on an estimate, and seven either fail a test or cannot be tested, and Malaysia passes both tests but is set aside for a third reason given below.

Several mechanisms can produce gaps of this shape, and this dataset does not separate them. Valuation basis differs by construction. A shipment declared as an export late in one year can clear as an import in the next. National subheadings below the six-digit level are not identical across countries, so the same machine can be filed under this heading on one side and another heading on the other. Transhipment is present in the file rather than hypothetical: Peru's 2024 record arrives as 24 rows, and 67 of its 386 units carry Hong Kong SAR in the second-partner field. Customs procedure coverage varies too, with Morocco and Nigeria each appearing on a C01 line as well as the C00 total. Which mechanism produced any particular gap is not established here, and the gaps are therefore reported rather than attributed.

The filter that produces these totals is load-bearing, and getting it wrong is the easiest way to publish a wrong number confidently. UN Comtrade returns the total line together with the mode-of-transport, customs-procedure and second-partner breakdowns of that same total, in one response, separated only by three code fields that are easy to read past. Adding them up double-counts. Peru is the clearest case: summing all 24 of its rows gives 1,544 units and USD 126.86M, exactly four times the correct 386 units and USD 31.71M. Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and Morocco inflate twofold in the same way, Nigeria and Thailand fourfold, and only Kenya, Kazakhstan, Algeria, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia arrive as a single row that cannot be added to anything. Every import-side number on this page comes from the one row where customsCode is C00, motCode is 0 and partner2Code is 0.

Of fourteen exporting countries queried for 2024 under this heading, ten returned a row and four — India, France, the United States and Mexico — returned none. Across the ten that filed, declared exports total USD 1,061.31M, of which China's USD 800.26M is 75.4 per cent. On units the ten total 21,378.6 and China's 18,017 is 84.3 per cent; counting only quantities that are declared rather than estimated the base falls to 21,151 and the share rises to 85.2 per cent. A country that returned no row has not reported zero. Both percentages are therefore shares among countries that filed, both are upper bounds on any wider share, and neither should be quoted as a world market share. The gap between the value share and the unit share — 8.9 percentage points — is the first thing the rest of the table explains.

The other filers separate cleanly by unit value, and the separation is wide enough to survive any reasonable objection to the underlying counts. Germany declared USD 156.26M on 1,527 units, or USD 102,329 each, taking 14.7 per cent of the reported value on 7.1 per cent of the reported units. Italy declared USD 50.02M on 553 units, USD 90,454 each. Turkey sits at USD 91,864 per unit on 198 units and Brazil at USD 97,286 on 26. The Netherlands works out at USD 67,971 per unit, but on an estimated quantity. China's own average across all 145 partner entries is USD 44,417. Spain declared USD 10.78M with no quantity at all, so it carries no unit value here and sits inside the value base while being absent from the unit base — one more reason the two shares are not directly comparable to each other.

Japan declared 830 units exported under this heading in 2024 for USD 8.45M, which is USD 10,185 per unit — 23 per cent of China's average and 10 per cent of Germany's. Across the sixteen markets queried, Japan declared exports to four of them: 574 units to the Philippines at USD 10,150 each, 76 to Malaysia at USD 8,824, 28 to the United Arab Emirates at USD 7,985 and 12 to Thailand at USD 4,035. Those four destinations account for 690 of the 830 units and every one of the four quantities is declared rather than estimated. So the band is not one anomalous shipment or one country's filing habit; it holds across four separate customs authorities and a spread of volumes running from twelve units to nearly six hundred.

It also survives being read from the other direction, which is rare on this page. The Philippines, as the importing reporter, records 679 units arriving from Japan in 2024 at USD 9,448 per unit. Japan, as the exporting reporter, records 574 units at USD 10,150. Two national statistics offices describing the same lane rarely match to the unit and these do not, but they place it within about seven per cent of each other on price and on the same order of magnitude on volume, with both quantities declared. That is a firmer footing than either number has alone, and it is the only bilateral pair in this material that agrees on both axes at once. The same Philippine table records 1,760 units arriving from China that year against China's declared 1,545 outbound, so the reporter is not systematically under-recording arrivals — the Japanese line is not an artefact of a thin filing.

What the customs record cannot say is why the band sits where it does. HS 8705.40 has no subheading for condition, and the Comtrade row layout for this heading carries reporter, partner, value, quantity, net and gross weight, mode of transport and customs procedure — and no field at all that separates new equipment from used. A declared value near a fifth of another country's average is consistent with several explanations, including differences in specification, in condition, in what the two exporting countries typically ship and in how each values a shipment for customs. A customs value alone distinguishes none of them. The price band is stated here as a fact about declared values, and no conclusion about the age, condition or specification of those machines is drawn from it.

Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates appear on China's 2024 export declaration — 1,270 units and USD 49.76M to Vietnam, 573 units and USD 31.90M to the UAE — and file no 2024 import figure of their own in this material. That is a gap in reporting rather than an inference drawn from silence, and the file shows it directly: the same seventeen-reporter import-side query that returned no 2024 row for either country returned 2023 rows for both. For 2023 Vietnam recorded 732.0 units from China on a UN estimate, worth USD 25.57M, against China's declared 726 units; the UAE recorded 237.4 units, also estimated, worth USD 15.26M, against China's declared 161. Both countries do report to this dataset; they have simply not filed this year of this heading, and the export side offers no way to tell whether that is a delay or a permanent absence.

The consequence is narrow and worth stating plainly. For these two markets there is no second record to test the first against, so neither of the two tests applied earlier can be run at all — not the scope test, not the FOB-versus-CIF test. The same limitation covers the largest destination on the whole export ranking: the Russian Federation, at 2,383 units and USD 122.71M, is not among the twelve countries that filed a 2024 world-import figure here. Between them those three destinations account for 4,226 of the 18,017 units, so 23.5 per cent of the export side has no counterpart anywhere in this material, including its single largest line. Where one side exists alone, this page reports what that side declared and does not present it as a market size or a demand figure.