How these Business Categories (Industry Sectors) came about

§ This page is available only in English, the official language of the United States, because it pertains to American institutions 

Industries on American Exports website are classified according to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) of 2007 and 2012, which has superseded the 1980 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC)

Its hierarchical structure is composed of sectors (two-digit code), subsectors (three-digit code), industry groups (four-digit code), and industries (five-digit code). For example, the Industry Sector (Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting) has five (5) sub-sectors, nineteen (19) Industry groups, and forty one (41) Industries. These are broadly comparable for all three North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries; United States, Canada and Mexico. Nonetheless, there are a number of important exceptions; a country may choose to breakdown industries (five-digit code) into national industries (six-digit code) in order to capture additional detail. As the name indicates, national industries are unique to each country and cross-comparisons generally do not apply

American Exports targets the entire global market; not just NAFTA, and it, therefore, recognizes the fact that other countries follow different classifications systems. With that in mind, we did the following changes:

         1- We posted both sectors and subsectors as (Business Categories)

         2- Sometimes, we slightly renamed some of the subsectors and/or moved some of them between the main sectors

         3- Other times, we used terminology used in other countries’ classification systems

Our goal is to simplify the communication process to ensure that exporters and importers speak the same language. We hope this does not cause confusion, and hold ourselves available to make any clarifications when necessary

We especially apologize for some sectors that might look redundant; such as (Manufacturing) and (Industrial), or (Chemicals) that may include contents of other sectors like Agriculture, Energy, and so on

American Exports Team