Revolutionizing Trade: AI Unmasks Hidden Patterns in Global Crisis

2023-10-11

Inside: How High Digital's AI Enhancement in Hanse Analytics Decodes International Trade Dynamics – From Brexit & COVID-19 Fallout to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine.

In 2020, High Digital won funding from The Sustainable Innovation Fund from Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency, to move the Hanse Analytics application on from its Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage.

The MVP of the Hanse Analytics software application provided international trade analytics, from the UN Comtrade Database. Funding was granted to expand the functionality, utility, and scalability of the original application. The new Hanse software application delivers more detailed international trade analytics, including monthly goods data from the UN Comtrade Database, a significant range of reporting countries, and new analytics reports.

The original use cases for Hanse Analytics focused on SMEs involved in international trade. As the fallout from Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to the Importers and exporters to and from the UK, Hanse Analytics aimed to offer data to help inform decisions.

Dr Ousmène Mandeng, Founder of East-West International Trade Analytics Ltd, says, “Covid-19 and Brexit have hugely complicated international trade relations and require new tools to help SMEs navigate the new environment successfully.”

High Digital’s latest addition to the Hanse Analytics application is a suite of features powered by AI. The new AI features help users navigate the data and uncover trends, patterns, and opportunities within the data that may not be obvious with manual interrogation.

Oliver Mackereth, Founder of High Digital Ltd, says, “AI features from the Microsoft suite allow us to add AI-powered functionality to the Hanse Analytics application relatively quickly which gives users incredible capabilities to query these large data sets.”

AI features, from natural language which operates a Q & A function, and smart analysis data, to analyse and detect key influences, and anomalies, and suggest insights, which can all be used by importers and exporters drilling into the data for alternative markets or suppliers.


However, Hanse Analytics has seen an increase in usage from academics, researchers, and journalists to uncover information from import-export data. For example, the war in Ukraine has seen a significant decline in exports to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. There have been allegations that Russia uses components including semiconductors from normal household electronic items like washing machines and laptop computers to supply its military machinery. While exports to Russia in these products have declined to extremely low levels, they increased significantly to countries deemed friendly to Russia.

The anomalies of increases in washing machines and computers in countries like Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan could indicate Russia finding alternative routes for sanctioned hardware. Anomaly detection and quick Insights identified exports of washing machines by Germany to Kazakhstan increased three-fold since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through April 2023 compared with the average level as measured in net weight of shipped products (the value of shipped products has not been reported since December 2021). Exports of washing machines from Italy to Georgia increased 10-fold during the same period. Pulling these key insights without the help of AI requires specific knowledge and time to conduct the analysis.

As advances in AI increase, the team will add more functionality to the application to generate vital insights to be delivered straight to the user in their chosen sectors and countries. Additionally, the team is exploring how the Comtrade data in Hanse Analytics can be associated with other data sources, like climate data or migration data to provide a deeper and richer analysis…watch this space.

High Digital is a London-based software development business that focuses on building data products.

Hanse Analytics provides analytics software to identify critical and timely international trade relationships.




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