Cargill Inc. is cutting its quarterly reporting, Reuters reports. Cargill, a private company, is not required to release information with the same time frames that its public competitors including Bunge Ltd. and Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. do. The company said it will continue to release annual revenue numbers and investments, though decision makers interested in the agricultural trade space are now missing a key data point.

Panjiva data can provide insights into a private company's international trade activity. Total shipments across Panjiva's data sets — including the U.S., Brazil, Mexico and others — associated with Cargill rose 23.4% year over year in the three months to April 30. Panjiva's research of May 27 noted that Cargill has a large international footprint suggesting a decline in activity in one country or product may be compensated  in one area can be compensated for with another.

Cargill's largest trading products across all datasets include cereal grains, which saw a 7.9% year-over-year increase in the 12 months to April 30. Shipments of seeds and fruit associated with the company surged 167.4% higher, while prepared products fell by 11.8% year over year.

Panjiva analysis of Cargill's supply chain graph, a mathematical representation of its supplier and buyer network, can shed additional light. Panjiva's supply chain graph for Cargill is created historically as a 12-month trailing network of relationships recalculated each month.

The analysis shows that the number of Cargill's direct suppliers dropped 8.0% in March as opposed to a slight increase of 0.4% the previous year. 

Total supplier turnover, which shows the number of new suppliers and lost suppliers compared to the total number of suppliers, reached a ratio of 38.8% in March and has been at an elevated level since early 2018. That would suggest a degree of upheaval in its supply chain. 

Finally, the number of shipments across the entire network was down 15.1% year over year in the first quarter, while total weight shipped dropped 37.4% year over year in the same period in a downward trend since May 2017. 

Eric Oak is a researcher at Panjiva, which is a business line of S&P Global Market Intelligence, a division of S&P Global Inc. This content does not constitute investment advice, and the views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Links are current at the time of publication. S&P Global Market Intelligence is not responsible if those links are unavailable later.