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Sector Data

  • Over 80 foreign consulates and trade centers are located in the City: 75 consulates and 14 foreign trade and investment offices.
  • 46 % of San Franciscans are bilingual: 112 languages are spoken here.
  • San Francisco is the financial epicenter of the U.S. West Coast—it houses more than 30 of the largest non-American banking institutions, including Barclays Bank of the United Kingdom, Sumitomo Bank of Japan, Banco di Roma of Italy, Banque Nationale de Paris of France, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of China, Lippo Bank of Indonesia, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
  • San Francisco sits at the epicenter of globalized economic trends like clean tech and the biomedical and IT and digital media industries.
  • Strong E.U. interest in Bay Area trade is evidenced by the arrival of trade and investment offices from Paris and London in 2006 and 2007 respectively, and strong interest from German and Scandinavian companies in the emerging clean technology field.
  • San Francisco ranked as the seventh-largest exporting region in the U.S. after Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Houston-Galveston, with a total volume of $47,072.1 million in 2010.
  • San Francisco is the nation's largest exporter to Asia.
  • The region processed approximately $107.6 billion in foreign trade, with imports constituting some $60,529.1 million.
  •  About 66% of the region's exports go to Asia while 17% are received in Europe.
  • The San Francisco foreign trade Zone #3 at Pier 23 offers special duty free import and export activities and specialized international services.
  • Commercial, maritime and public activities are available at the Port of San Francisco, which supports diverse businesses including cargo shipping, ship repair, excursion boats, ferry boats, commercial real-estate, fishing and fish processing/distribution, tourism, location filming, harbor services and cruise-shipping.
  • San Francisco enrolls bright local and international talent in its world-renowned research universities and colleges: 32% of graduate students at Stanford and 23% of graduate students at UC Berkeley are from overseas.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO)

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is essential to San Francisco's connections abroad. SFO offers direct flights to many destinations in Europe and Asia.  Some key attributes:

  • Located 13 miles from downtown San Francisco
  • Includes 3,261,000 sq feet of domestic terminal and 2,500,000 of international terminal space, amounting to 5,761,000 sq feet in total
  • Total enplaned and deplaned passengers: 39,116,764
  • Recently completed a $2.4 billion expansion, including a new international terminal, Bart and Mono Rail Access routes
  • Recently completed a $383 million update of Terminal 2, adding 640,000 sq feet of domestic terminal space
  • Total loaded and unloaded cargo (airmail + air freight): 426,724 metric tons