Benchmarking Q1 Lighting and Industrial Controls

It’s always good to benchmark your performance when you can have access to trending industry information.  The September 2016 issue if NEMA’s electroindustry shared some Q1 2016 data in the areas of lamps, lighting and industrial controls.

This information is based on NEMA’s shipment indices and, by their nature, are for all channels as NEMA data is not segmented by channel to market.  It is also not known the origin of the data in the sense of does it include all manufacturers in a product category, all NEMA members in that product category or only “participating” NEMA members in that category.  If manufacturers are reporting the data we’ll presume it to be accurate.

So, with the caveats aside …

Lighting

• Shipments of metal halide lamps in Q1 decreased by 16.1%
  • Sodium vapor lamps accounted for 34.1% of HID sales
  • Mercury vapor lamps accounted for 4.1% of HID sales
  • Metal halide sales accounted for 61.8% of HID sales
• Fluorescent Lamps
  • T8 lamps accounted for 67.4% of sales
  • T12 lamps accounted for 14.5% of sales
  • T5 lamps accounted for 11.2% of sales
  • T-LED lamps accounted for 6.9% of sales
• Lighting Systems
  • The lighting systems shipment index, which is a measure of demand for lighting equipment, decreased .8% on a QoQ basis but was up .6% YoY
  • Fixtures and emergency lighting components of the index gained
  • Ballast, miniature lamp and large lamp components declined

End result.  These types of lamp sources decreased.  LEDs increased.

Industrial Controls

• Primary Industrial Controls index declined 1.7% in Q1vs Q4 2015 and a 10.5% decline vs prior year.
• Industrial controls and adjustable speed drives index posted a 2.7% decrease in Q1 vs Q4 2015 and a 15% decrease vs 2015

Yes, the information is anti-climatic given the revenue and profit challenges of Q1, however, now you can have a sense if you lost share in your market or if you / your market was off much more than national averages.

The goal of benchmarking is to provide an indication.  We hope you overperformed.