Prior to the NAED Eastern in November and the upcoming NAED Western (next week), we’ve been surveying distributors and manufacturers on their 2014 sales outlook, what strategies are important to their growth and what product categories and/or applications will drive sales.
As many knows, the NAED West essentially is covers from the Mississippi River to California.
To date we have 140 people / companies that have responded, split pretty evenly between manufacturers and distributors. The manufacturer component provides more of a national sense of the market whereas the distributors focus in their territory.
The results for the two region are:
And the date shows an
- overall market of 4.48%, which is an increase of about .5% from the Eastern study (3.97%)
- the industrial market relatively unchanged. Now at 4.17% vs 4.02% in November.
- the construction / contractor market significantly moving up to 4.41%, up 1% from November.
Some thoughts:
- could there be more optimism now that the government has a budget and that crises is averted?
- is the West projected to be so much higher that it can raise the overall outlook so much, especially for the contractor / construction market?
And we also noticed that the priority of some strategies changed. The top 4-5 remained the same (although the order changed a little) but those in the middle did change. The resi / remodeling market increased in importance, potentially due to multi-family housing which we are hearing is generating opportunities for distributors in metropolitan areas.
We’ll survey attendees of the upcoming NAED South-Central and add their input and will then provide a national as well as marketplace projections. This will be available in late February (the meeting is the last week of February.
If you’d like a copy of the updated 2014 Electrical Market Outlook report, email me. And if you haven’t taken the survey yet, click here to participate.
And if you’re going to the Western and want to get together to discuss … give me a call at 919-488-8635.
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