Subject: The chemicals market forecast should not be a guess
Would anyone quarrel with the statement that more company disasters are caused by inaccurate market forecasts than by any other factor? All you have to do is read the chairman’s statement when the company has had a loss year. Invariably, the first paragraph is all about a market which was lower than anticipated.
Does this mean that most companies will spend a lot of time and effort to make better forecasts? No! Most companies rationalize that precise market forecasting is impossible. They argue that a big effort is not likely to produce better results than the guesstimates of the sales force.
This argument might have been valid in the past, but no longer. The retail sector has proven that analysis of millions of data bits can result in greatly improved forecasting. The same approach works for the forecasting of water and wastewater treatment chemicals.
How big will the market for polymers for municipal wastewater treatment be in China three years from now? Thanks to modern communications, it is possible to identify every Chinese wastewater treatment plant under construction. In fact, if these plants are built, the Chinese secondary waste treatment capacity will jump to 18,000 MGD or about half that of the U.S.
Even the amount of polymer used per MGD of treatment capacity can be predicted thanks to all the data bits. For example, it is possible to predict how many of these plants will use centrifuges and how many will use belt presses for dewatering.
The Internet provides a wealth of information. The McIlvaine company has taken advantage of it to project not only MGD of sewage transport and primary and secondary treatment in each country in future years, but also bbl/dy of refining capacity, MW of coal, nuclear, and gas power plants, chemical, pharmaceutical, and steel production, and all the other basic industry statistics on which to build a water and wastewater treatment forecast.
Forecasts have to be subject to immediate adjustment. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was an event which instantaneously changed the outlook for most products and services. Events of lesser magnitude happen continuously. The McIlvaine system, which is based on real time queries over the Internet, is designed to take these into account and to display new numbers as the events occur.
Customize the forecasts to reflect your specific products. Another advantage of modern technology is that the customized revenue forecasts are achieved with just one more column or one more record on the electronic spread sheet. These customizing factors are also some of the most important numbers the corporation will forecast. They are market share, product pricing, etc.
For more information on a customized system with a protected web site just for your personnel, contact Bob McIlvaine at: 847-784-0012 or rmcilvaine@mcilvainecompany.com
For more details on this subject see “market research from an art to a science” at:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/Integrated%20services/int%20home.htm
Bob McIlvaine
847-784-0012