ICEGATE shipping bills, plainly explained for non-customs people
What a shipping bill actually contains, what is public, what is not, and why this matters for GTM.
When an Indian exporter ships a container, the shipment passes through Customs. The exporter files a shipping bill via ICEGATE, the Indian Customs electronic gateway. The shipping bill records the exporter's IEC, the consignee country, the HS code, the value, the port, and the date.
A shipping bill is not by default a public document. The exporter's name, the consignee name, and the exact value are private. But aggregate statistics are published by Customs and by DGFT, and IEC holders are listed publicly. So while you cannot pull "Exporter X shipped Y crates to Z on date D", you can pull "Exporter X is an active IEC holder shipping under HS chapter 52".
Kestrel combines two surfaces. From DGFT, the live list of IEC holders, their primary HS chapters, and their first-export date. From ICEGATE, the public aggregate flows by port, by HS chapter, by destination, by month. We attach DGFT IEC data to companies via PAN (positions 3 to 12 of IEC match the company's PAN), and we infer per-company trade activity from the aggregate flows, the IEC issue date, and the company's public website.
This produces enough resolution to detect first export, new destination, and volume-band changes, without crossing into the parts of shipping-bill data that are not public. Trade-services teams who want shipment-by-shipment data buy that from licensed third parties; Kestrel's default tier is registry-public.
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