How to Download Mexico Business Directory Data in Bulk (DENUE and Beyond)

Mexico's statistics institute publishes every registered establishment in the country — 5.5 million of them, with coordinates, industry codes, and employee ranges. This guide covers exporting that directory in bulk, plus the registries for Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.

Why DENUE is the best business directory in Latin America

DENUE — the Directorio Estadístico Nacional de Unidades Económicas — is run by INEGI, Mexico's statistics institute. It is not a scraped aggregation or a resold lead list. It is the official census of economic units, and it carries three things commercial B2B databases usually charge extra for or don't have at all.

Geo coordinates on every record. Each establishment has a latitude and longitude, not just a postal address. That makes DENUE directly usable for territory planning, catchment analysis, and store-location work without a geocoding step.

SCIAN industry codes. SCIAN is Mexico's implementation of NAICS, so a DENUE extract joins cleanly to US and Canadian industry data. You can pull "all restaurants in Jalisco" or "all auto parts manufacturers in Nuevo León" as a filtered query rather than a keyword guess.

Employee ranges per establishment. Records carry an estrato band — 0 a 5 personas, 6 a 10 personas, and so on. Company-size filtering is usually the first thing a B2B list needs and the first thing a directory omits.

The catch is access. INEGI exposes DENUE through an API that returns a few hundred records per call, paginated, with a token you have to register for. Pulling a whole state means orchestrating hundreds of calls and stitching the pages together.

Exporting DENUE by state and industry

The Mexico business directory export handles that pagination for you. Pick a state code, add an activity keyword, and it returns the matching establishments as structured records.

The fields you get per establishment:

Field	What it holds
nombre	Trade name of the establishment
razon_social	Legal name (razón social)
clase_actividad	SCIAN economic activity class
estrato	Employee range band
calle, num_exterior, colonia, cp	Street address components
entidad, ubicacion	State code and state + municipality

Set entidad to "00" to cross all 32 states, or a two-digit code to stay inside one — "09" is CDMX. The keyword filter matches against activity descriptions, so "restaurante" narrows to food service and an empty value returns every establishment in the selection.

You need a free INEGI API token, which takes an email registration at inegi.org.mx. That is INEGI's requirement, not ours — the token is free and does not expire.

Brazil: CNPJ records from Receita Federal

Brazil's equivalent is the CNPJ registry maintained by Receita Federal, the federal tax authority. The CNPJ export queries it with filters most commercial sources don't expose: state, municipality, CNAE industry code, legal form, or partner CPF.

That partner filter is the unusual one. Searching by CPF returns every company a given person is a partner in, which is the query pattern behind ownership mapping and related-party checks.

For São Paulo specifically, the JUCESP state registry export adds what the federal record omits: NIRE, constitution date, share capital, and the business object as filed with the state commercial board. Federal CNPJ data tells you a company exists; JUCESP tells you what it registered itself to do and with how much capital.

Chile: listed issuers and material disclosures from CMF

Chile's securities regulator, the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero, publishes issuer filings and hechos esenciales — the material-disclosure notices listed companies must file when something moves. The CMF issuer export covers roughly 500 listed issuers on the RVEMI securities register, returning filings, disclosures, and director records. No login required.

This is a narrower dataset than DENUE or CNPJ by design — it covers listed issuers, not every business — so it belongs in market-monitoring and diligence workflows rather than list building.

Colombia: government grant and tender calls

Colombia's iNNpulsa publishes convocatorias — public calls for grants, accelerator programs, and innovation funding. The iNNpulsa export collects them as structured records. If you are tracking which Colombian companies are eligible for or receiving state innovation support, this is the primary source.

Mexican property listings, if you need the other side

Business directories cover operators. If you need the real estate itself, the Mexico property export pulls listings from Inmuebles24 and Vivanuncios — the two portals that carry most of the country's residential and commercial inventory.

Coverage at a glance

Country	Source	Filter by	Scale
Mexico	DENUE (INEGI)	State, activity keyword	5.5M+ establishments
Brazil	Receita Federal (CNPJ)	State, CNAE, municipality, partner CPF	Full federal registry
Brazil (SP)	JUCESP	Company name, CNPJ, NIRE	São Paulo state registry
Chile	CMF (RVEMI)	Issuer	~500 listed issuers
Colombia	iNNpulsa	Convocatoria	Active grant calls

What this replaces

The commercial route to Latin American company data is a B2B database subscription — an annual contract, seat licensing, and a per-country uplift, usually with a lag between the registry publishing a change and the aggregator reflecting it.

These exports price per record retrieved. A one-off territory analysis across three Mexican states costs what those records cost and then stops. There is no minimum and no contract, which matters most for the work that is genuinely one-off: a market-entry study, a franchise catchment model, a due-diligence pass on a target's supplier list.

The trade-off is that you get each registry's own fields at each registry's own freshness, and you do the cross-border entity matching yourself. The identifiers in the table above — RFC, CNPJ, NIRE, SCIAN and CNAE codes — are the join keys.

Which export do I need?

• B2B list building in Mexico — DENUE, filtered by state and SCIAN activity, with estrato for company size.
• Territory or catchment analysis — DENUE, using the per-record coordinates.
• KYC and ownership mapping in Brazil — CNPJ by partner CPF, then JUCESP for capital and business object.
• Market monitoring in Chile — CMF hechos esenciales.
• Grant and public-funding tracking in Colombia — iNNpulsa convocatorias.

For company registries in Europe and the US, see How to Get Company Registry Data in Bulk. For the wider catalog, browse Which Web Scraper Do I Need?.