Monday, March 06, 2006
January Printing Shipments -3.96%, -7.5% in Real Terms
January typically represents 8% of U.S. printing industry shipments for the year. In current dollars, January's shipments were $6.878 billion, down -$279 million in current terms, -$564 million in real terms.
December shipments were revised by +$7 million, which made the revised total for 2005 $88.36 billion, or $89.715 billion in inflation-adjusted terms (we adjust data monthly based on the latest CPI). Assuming that January is typical of the year, in current terms, 2006 will be $87B, or down -$1.3B from last year.
In inflation-adjusted terms, it looks more like $85.4B, or down -$4.3B. I'm sticking with my back-of-the-envelope down -$5B in real terms for 2006 compared to 2005, which would be down in percentage terms
-5.5%.
Because of the change in the industry's seasonality, March is likely to be printing's biggest month. It is probably going to be the bellwether month that will give a better indication of the rest of the year. We won't have March shipments data until early May. February data will be released on March 31.
I have charts and graphs available as a PrintForecast.com "Data-to-Go" at http://store.yahoo.com/drjoe/dataproduct1.html
"Data-to-Go" has a short Powerpoint presentation for easy cut and paste into reports and elsewhere, a PDF, Excel file of the raw data, and a MP3 file of my commentary.
December shipments were revised by +$7 million, which made the revised total for 2005 $88.36 billion, or $89.715 billion in inflation-adjusted terms (we adjust data monthly based on the latest CPI). Assuming that January is typical of the year, in current terms, 2006 will be $87B, or down -$1.3B from last year.
In inflation-adjusted terms, it looks more like $85.4B, or down -$4.3B. I'm sticking with my back-of-the-envelope down -$5B in real terms for 2006 compared to 2005, which would be down in percentage terms
-5.5%.
Because of the change in the industry's seasonality, March is likely to be printing's biggest month. It is probably going to be the bellwether month that will give a better indication of the rest of the year. We won't have March shipments data until early May. February data will be released on March 31.
I have charts and graphs available as a PrintForecast.com "Data-to-Go" at http://store.yahoo.com/drjoe/dataproduct1.html
"Data-to-Go" has a short Powerpoint presentation for easy cut and paste into reports and elsewhere, a PDF, Excel file of the raw data, and a MP3 file of my commentary.
