Company specific details and any data from which it might be possible to identify individual companies will not be published.

Following the collection of data on exports, the data are cleaned and quality assured by Scottish Government statisticians. Outputs are subject to rigorous quality assurance and where possible other sources are used to review figures.

Export Statistics Scotland is a National Statistic, certified by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its Code of Practice for Official Statistics. The code of practice is available here.

There is no UK survey which compares exactly with Export Statistics Scotland. Section 8 of the publication provides charts and commentary comparing Export Statistics Scotland export estimates with other UK and Scottish sources. Total exports for the UK which combine HMRC Overseas Trade Statistics and the UK International Trade in Services are published by ONS: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/

These statistics are published in the Export Statistics Scotland National Statistics publication. The data is published in Excel format and is also available as a PDF with accompanying commentary, available here.

The data are of interest to government policy makers, politicians, the business community, economic commentators, academics and members of the general public with an interest in the Scottish economy.

The international exports estimates are used in National Indicator to “Increase exports”. Further information on this can be found on the Scotland Performs website: https://nationalperformance.gov.scot/international-exporting.

The publication is released in January each year, with the 2018 publication published in January 2020.

Estimates for previous years are revised from those published in the previous year and are largely due to new information being provided by companies. The most recent results are provisional, and are likely to be revised in the future when improved information becomes available.