Pitch & evidence pack
Market research
Bangladesh import market — sourced facts, separated from assumptions
Every statement below is tagged: sourced fact, derived from a sourced fact, or assumption. Nothing is presented as research that is actually opinion.
Market context
China supplied USD 18,195.8 million (27.0%) of Bangladesh's import payments in FY2024-25, up from USD 16,637.1 million a year earlier.
Sourced factSource / note: Bangladesh Bank — country-wise import payments, FY2024-25.
India was the second largest supplier at USD 9,555.6 million (14.2%) in FY2024-25.
Sourced factSource / note: Bangladesh Bank — country-wise import payments, FY2024-25.
Total Bangladesh merchandise import payments in FY2024-25 were therefore approximately USD 67 billion.
DerivedSource / note: Derived from the published China figure and its stated 27.0% share (18,195.8 ÷ 0.27).
Bangladesh's import mix is broad — food grains, consumer goods, industrial raw materials and capital machinery all appear in the official commodity-wise series, meaning classification questions are not concentrated in one product family.
Sourced factSource / note: Bangladesh Bank — commodity-wise import statistics recorded by customs, annual data.
The majority of SME importers in Bangladesh handle classification and landed-cost estimation manually or through an intermediary rather than with software.
AssumptionSource / note: Founder observation. Not measured. Listed as an open validation item.
Customer pain points
Landed cost is discovered late
The buy decision is made on unit price and rough freight; duty, VAT, regulatory charges and fees resolve only after the shipment is committed.
Classification depends on one person
HS code selection is often institutional memory. A wrong code means a duty surprise, a re-assessment, or a penalty at the port.
Compliance surfaces at the port
Permits, certifications and documentation requirements are identified after arrival rather than before ordering.
No shareable artifact
The analysis lives in a spreadsheet or a head, so it cannot be reviewed, versioned or handed to a partner or lender.
Source / note: Pain points are founder-observed in the Bangladeshi import market and mirror the workflow the product replaces. Documented importer interviews are an open validation item.
Market sizing methodology
We size bottom-up from importer counts rather than top-down from trade value, because trade value does not convert to software revenue. Every input below is labelled. Importer counts are estimated ranges, not registry figures — obtaining registry-grounded counts is an open action item.
TAM — All Bangladeshi commercial entities that import goods and could pay for trade-decision software.
AssumptionInput: Importer population × annual software spend per importer.
Source / note: We do not publish a TAM number here because the importer population input is not yet verified. Presenting a confident TAM figure on an unverified input would be the kind of claim this deck refuses to make.
SAM — Regularly-importing SMEs in Dhaka and Chattogram, digitally reachable, receiving supplier documents electronically.
AssumptionInput: TAM filtered by import frequency, geography and digital reachability.
Source / note: Filters are defensible in logic; the underlying counts still need a registry or association source.
SOM — What a pre-seed team can serve in the first 12 months.
AssumptionInput: Founder-led sales capacity × realistic conversion, not a market-share percentage.
Source / note: We size SOM by sales capacity because a percentage-of-market SOM at pre-seed is not credible.
Sources still to obtain
- NBR / customs importer registration counts (registered importers by category).
- Bangladesh Bank LC opening statistics by importer size band.
- Trade association membership counts (chambers, importer and indenting associations).
Alternatives and competitors
| Alternative | Category | Where it sits | Gap LANDED addresses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheets + broker phone call | Status quo | Before the decision | No structure, no audit trail, quality depends entirely on the individual. This is the real competitor. |
| Freight and customs platforms | Execution software | After the decision | Optimises shipping and filing once the buy is already committed. |
| Global trade compliance databases | Data subscription | Reference layer | Sells tariff and regulation data at enterprise price points; the importer still has to turn it into a decision. |
| Customs brokers and indenting houses | Service | Around the decision | Accurate but serial, informal and unshareable — and a channel for us rather than purely a competitor. |
| General-purpose AI chat | Substitute | Anywhere | Will answer, but with no provenance labelling, no structured landed-cost model, no verification checklist and no exportable artifact. |
Source / note: Category comparison is qualitative positioning, not a feature audit of named vendors. No competitor pricing, market share or customer counts are claimed.
This pitch pack contains no customer, revenue, partnership or accuracy claims. Where a number is not directly sourced, it is labelled as derived or as an assumption with its method shown. Prepared by TrendFlux Digital for Startup World Cup Bangladesh 2026. Last reviewed 27 August 2026.