Dr Joe's Printing Industry Blog

And they call me Dr. Doom. I thought about that the other day. I distinctly remember giving executives in the company I was at good news, that the market was growing, and that we wouldn't see any decline in our products (graphic arts film) until the mid 1990s. That was somewhere around 1986 I was saying that. It was good news, and they didn't believe me. Dr. Unrealistic Optimist they would have called me, but I didn't have my Ph.D. yet.

I just report what the data are... they're not good, they're not bad, they're just data. I look for patterns in the data. They're not good, they're not bad, they're just patterns.

Commerce has already revised the first six months of 2005 shipments data down by -$2.4 billion. The total revision from 1999 to 2005 (which was only six months of data) is -$8 billion. All of the monthly revisions they made to 1999 netted out to zero. The shocker is of course the size of the revision to 2005, which is only for six months. The revisions also affected the growth of the industry compared to last year. Prior reports had us growing. Now we're down -2% compared to last year. I won't even bother adjusting for inflation... it's too depressing.

Needless to say, it is not good news. I have had all of my shipments and profits models updated, and will present and discuss the new data at Print05. Where do we go from here? I'll discuss that, too.

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