By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights
Polaris makes snowmobiles, motorcycles, ATVs, and power boats – all big-ticket discretionary goods, a category of consumer expenditure that has been in a world of hurt following a pandemic / fiscal stimulus fueled super-cycle in 2021 / ‘22. Higher...
By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights
Production activity at Freemont, Austin, and Berlin has stepped meaningfully lower in February, accentuating the negative trend at year end. Clearly, Tesla’s sales and operations team are observing a slackening in demand, confirming industry and press...
SiteOne’s business and results are interesting these days as they provide a read on the results of immigration policy on industries heavily dependent on immigrants, extreme weather and natural disasters, commodity inflation, and housing. The latter three of these were impactful to SiteOne’s Q4 as...
What struck us about Amazon’s Q4 results was the significant upside in its North America margins and profits; margins hit 8.0% vs. the expectation of 6.5% (BBG) and EBIT hit $9.3B vs. the expectation of $7.4B. Amazon has worked diligently to lower the cost to serve since early 2023 by staging...
With the dockworkers’ strike that started at midnight disrupting port operations across the East and Gulf Coasts, it’s essential to understand how this will affect the flow of goods into and out of the U.S. Ports are critical infrastructure points, and the impact of strikes or delays can reflect...
Automotive is one of the industries that has been struggling with chip shortages, supply chain issues and labor shortages for months now. But do all the carmakers struggle at the same level? To answer the question, we employed Advan’s foot traffic data for two US automakers and one Japanese: Ford...
Workers at Deere & Co. (DE), the world’s top agriculture equipment manufacturer, walked out of its factories to demand better pay and health benefits, a move that had not be seen in over 30 years, and while the company is on track for its most successful year ever. The strike started on Oct. 14...
Following the recent news that Ford is expected to halt production for two weeks in April due to chip shortages, and given our recent study on this exact subject few months back we wanted to take a closer look and quantify how the largest US carmakers and the industry as a whole is currently...
It’s been a year now into full or partial lockdowns, social distancing rules and work from home as a result of the COVID crisis which unequivocally forced people to spend more time into their homes and consequently to change their shopping habits - reconsidering what is essential and therefore set...
After the lockdown last spring that forced manufacturers from all sectors to halt production, auto makers now have to face another challenge: the global chip shortage due to the high demand on consumer electronics (laptops, gaming consoles, TVs etc.). The increased need for the technology devices...
For investors, foot traffic data is fast becoming a critical weapon as part of an alternative data armory. The value of tracking real-time visitation numbers to retail and consumer-facing compa-nies is widely recognized. Yet, as we explore here, measuring traffic to industrial companies can offer...
In this third blog post of our summer series, we review two different measures of economic activity that can help paint an overall picture of consumer trends.
Measuring foot traffic at consumer discretionary businesses helps us understand the extent to which people are back to shopping for...