# What the Data Covers [!button variant="warning" icon="arrow-right" iconAlign="right" target="blank" text="Open the Full Methodology (PDF)"](/static/docs/icp-methodology-general.pdf) ## What is Primary Commodity Prices? {#what-is-primary-commodity-prices} !!!light Summary An annual subscription program that delivers monthly, independent price assessments for commodities worldwide, built from official trade data and computational models rather than subjective market quotes, and organized by industry. !!! Primary Commodity Prices is an annual subscription program that delivers monthly, independent price assessments for commodities worldwide. A new set of assessments is released each month, following the published release schedule, so the reported values reflect the latest available data. It serves traders, procurement and cost teams, analysts, and others who need reliable, independent price benchmarks. Three principles govern the program's design: - **Objective measurement:** assessments rest on verifiable, quantitative data — primarily international trade deals reported by official statistics — rather than subjective buyer and seller quotes that reflect expectations rather than actual transactions. This keeps the data transparent, auditable, and unbiased. - **Standardized assessment:** the same methodology is applied across every commodity and every month, so month-to-month comparisons remain valid. - **Actionable synthesis:** monthly price assessments and short-term forecasts are organized into a consistent structure that turns raw data into decision-ready insight. The methods behind each price value — trade-based, formula-based, freight-based, manufacturing cost-based, and compiled — are detailed on the [Price Assessments](price-assessments.md) page, and the monthly release cadence on the [Data Timing](data-timing.md) page. ## Which industries and commodities does Primary Commodity Prices cover? {#which-industries-and-commodities-does-primary-commodity-prices-cover} !!!light Summary Coverage spans seven industries and 220+ commodities, framed as industries → commodities → locations. The per-industry commodity lists live in [Industries and Commodities Covered](industries-and-commodities-covered.md); the exhaustive per-assessment list lives in the assessment catalog. !!! Coverage is framed from the industry down: **industries → commodities → locations**. Seven fixed industries organize the full scope — Fertilizers & Gases, Olefins & Derivatives, Aromatics & Derivatives, Alcohols & Organic Acids, Polymers, Inorganic Chemicals, and Metals & Mining — and across them 220+ commodities are assessed. For each commodity, the assessments recognized as most relevant for international trade are presented, spanning multiple countries and world regions. The commodities assessed within each industry are listed in [Industries and Commodities Covered](industries-and-commodities-covered.md), while the exhaustive, per-assessment coverage — every commodity and every location assessed within each industry — is maintained in the assessment catalog, which is the authoritative reference for what is covered and is kept current there rather than reproduced here. ## How is coverage organized? {#how-is-coverage-organized} !!!light Summary A subscription is purchased by industry, not by country. Subscribing to an industry grants access to every commodity assessment within it across all covered countries and world regions. !!! Coverage is organized by industry, not by country. A subscription is purchased by industry: subscribing to an industry grants access to every commodity assessment within it, across all the countries and world regions covered for those commodities. For each commodity, a new price value is released monthly for each available series. !!!success *A subscription to Polymers grants access to the assessments for every polymer commodity in that industry — HDPE, LDPE, LLDPE, Polystyrene, and the rest — across all the countries and world regions where each is assessed.* !!! Geographically, coverage is organized around the four Intratec world regions — Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa & Middle East — which are defined in the [World Regions](../our-framework/world-regions.md) article. Unlike solutions built around a fixed country set, coverage here is not limited to a defined universe of countries: it extends to all countries covered for the commodities within each subscribed industry. ## How does Primary Commodity Prices differ from other solutions? {#how-does-primary-commodity-prices-differ-from-other-solutions} Each Intratec solution answers a different question about industrial markets: - **Primary Commodity Prices** — independent monthly price assessments for 220+ commodities worldwide, organized by industry: what a commodity is worth in a given market. - **Energy Prices & Markets** — energy commodity prices together with market trends, trade flows, and self-sufficiency analyses for its defined country set. - **Industry Economics & Competitiveness** — monthly rankings of country manufacturing competitiveness across seven industrial sectors. - **Commodity Production Costs** — capital and operating cost analyses of industrial plants: what it costs to produce a commodity, rather than what it trades for. The solutions also feed one another. Manufacturing cost-based price assessments, for example, draw their raw material, energy, and utility inputs from the commodity, energy, and industry-economics portfolios, as described in [Where do the input prices come from?](price-assessments.md#where-do-the-input-prices-come-from). ## How is the analysis validated? {#how-is-the-analysis-validated} Validation is the final stage of a fixed monthly data path: data is collected from outside sources, prepared and aligned to a common basis of currency and units, and only then validated before publication. Every published figure passes through the same two-layer validation applied across all Intratec solutions — automated checks on the full dataset, plus human expert review of a representative, risk-guided sample. The full process, including how anomalies are flagged and how accuracy is tracked over time, is described in the [Validation & Accuracy](../validation-and-accuracy/validation.md) section.