An exporter preparing to enter a new market usually begins with a broad question. Is demand in this category growing or shrinking? Which countries are buying more of it this year? Who else is supplying them? These are the right questions. They are the base of every sound market decision, and no amount of sales effort makes up for getting them wrong.

The mistake is rarely the question. It is the answer an exporter settles for.

The first number is not the checked number

Market figures reach most exporters second-hand: a trade magazine, an industry report, a slide in someone else’s presentation, a forecast quoted as if it were a result. Each of these can be useful. None of them is the same as the official record of what was actually shipped, where, and for how much.

India publishes that record. The Department of Commerce releases export and import figures by product code and by country, free to anyone with a browser. Most of the questions an exporter asks about a market can be checked against it before a rupee is spent.

What happens when the check is skipped

Sol Gravitas™ ran exactly this check on India’s stone exports in September 2026. A sector projection, published in an Italian stone-industry magazine, put India’s 2025 stone exports down about 14 per cent, a fourth straight year of decline. Indian customs data for the same twelve months showed worked stone exports up 3.9 per cent.

An exporter reading only the projection would conclude the sector was shrinking and that this was a year to wait. The official data described something else: a sector that had lost part of its largest market and replaced it within the year.

The market question is the right question. The mistake is accepting the first answer without checking it.

The total hides the story

Even a correct total can mislead. In the stone data, the headline growth was modest. What moved underneath it was not. The United States, India’s largest buyer of worked stone, bought 14.65 per cent less in 2025. Vietnam, the United Kingdom and Poland together added more than the United States took away.

For an exporter, that is the useful finding. A market is not one number. It is a set of destinations, product lines and suppliers, each moving in its own direction. A flat total can hide one market closing and another opening, and those two call for very different plans.

What a sound market read looks like

None of this needs special access. It needs discipline about where each figure comes from. A market read an exporter can rely on names the source of every figure, so it can be checked. It cross-checks each figure against a second, separate source. It states the method and the date the data was taken. And it says plainly what the data cannot show.

The stone study also dropped one of its own findings, because two official databases gave figures that could not both be right. That is part of the discipline too. A figure that fails the check is left out, not smoothed over.

Exporters do not go wrong by asking about the market. They go wrong by treating a forecast, a headline or an unchecked report as settled fact. The market question is worth asking properly, with the official record open beside it.

Think with Insights.