Tuesday, July 05, 2005

 

May Printing Shipments Data and PIA's Profits Data

May printing shipments were up slightly compared to May of 2004, and industry shipments to date are up 0.7% compared to last year on a current dollar basis. Adjusting for inflation, the industry is down about -2% for the first five months of the year.

These data will be discussed in detail in my next WTT column on July 15.

Data are from the manufacturer shipments report released on Tuesday, July 5. http://www.census.gov/indicator/www/m3/

Last week, PIA released data about printer profits for their 2005 Financial Ratios. Let's be clear: they're not 2005 data, they're data from 2004, so 2005 designates that they are published this year. (Who'd want to buy a 2004 report in 2005, anyway?)

The Financial Ratios are a marvelous undertaking, and I use them for a variety of tasks in my modeling (Harrie Lewis was the person most responsible for my using them, almost 25 years ago).

The data are not directly projectable to the marketplace, as the sampling and weighting that one would expect from a market research study are not applicable, though they could be weighted to reflect the full marketplace. Whatever-- this is quibbly stuff. The key thing for me is that it's a consistently applied methodology and there are few industry data series that go back that far that can say that.

The release made me look at my data series that I use from the Commerce Department, which is more aggregate, and based on tax returns and other data. PIA's release stated that the profit rate was up by 50%. The Commerce Department Data on profits before income taxes, combined with the data series on shipments (cited above) that I use gave me these year-to-year changes:

...........Profits as %
Year ....of Sales .......Change
1995 ......8.3%
1996 ......9.2% ......+11.2%
1997 ......8.9% ......-3.7%
1998 ......10.5% ......+18.1%
1999 ......10.8% ......+3.0%
2000 ......8.6% ......-20.2%
2001 ......2.6% ......-70.0%
2002 ......4.5% ......+72.7%
2003 ......3.8% ......-14.2%
2004 ......4.8% ......+25.1%

I'll discuss more in the 7/15 column.

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