enx magazine

The office equipment industry is an industry that lives by the numbers. With so many different market research and consulting companies working the industry, there’s always a lot of numbers floating around. Market share numbers, sales figures, connectivity rates— you name it, someone is tracking it. But just how accurate are those numbers regarding shipments, especially when in most cases it’s nothing more than a guessing game?

Before we get started, let’s not forget that the office equipment industry is an industry where market share is everything and everyone likes to boast how large a share they have. It’s kind of like hanging out in the men’s locker room at the YMCA. That oft-used and annoying phrase, “size matters” really does for office equipment manufacturers unless they’re that tiny crumb on the market share pie chart.

As many of us who cover the industry have seen, it’s not unusual for multiple manufacturers to boast how they’re number one in a particular product category. It’s gotten to the point where many industry observers like myself take all these numbers with an unhealthy heaping helping of salt. Why shouldn’t we? We attend all the various dealer meetings and oddly enough, it always seems as if everybody’s business is growing every year. But can that really be happening? Somebody has to be losing, right? This whole numbers game is really kind of wacky when you step back and look at it subjectively and objectively.

We’re Number One

Is there too big of an emphasis on market share in the industry? An analyst with one of the leading market research companies who spoke off the record doesn’t think so. “It’s a nice convenient way to look at who is successful and who is less successful,” he says. “Vendors like to see it and end-users like to see it.”

Frank Cannata, president of Market Research Consultants, has a different view, at least with the way market share is being currently reported. “It’s a joke. It’s akin to when I go to a football game and these morons are standing up there with these big plastic hands with the fingers that say, we’re number one. What does that do for you?”

I don’t want to knock the market research companies. I give them credit for what they do because it takes strong analytical minds and keen insights into the market to try and make sense of all these numbers that may or may not be accurate. And then take those numbers that they know can’t be completely accurate and massage them in such a way so that it reflects a bit more realistically on what kind of business the reporting company is actually doing. The rub though is sometimes they’re dead on and sometimes they’re off, but because not all numbers are certified, nobody really knows for sure.

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