Having developed at top speed，China'ssmall and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs)failtoremainas competitiveas before. Moreover，take the financial crisis into consideration，SMEs are sufferinga hard time in the global competition. So it should be the researchers' concern how to help small business identify opportunities in the global market. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the shift -share analysis(SSM)and then discuss how it can be applied in international marketing research.As anillustrationof application，theshift -shareanalysis was used to identify export opportunities for statuettes and other ornamental ceramic articles in the South American Market using data of import form China during 2004～2008.