July 6, 2016

Estimating current and future transformers markets

Introduction With the increasing globalisation of markets and manufacturers keen to explore the attractiveness of less familiar markets, there has never been a greater need...

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Introduction

With the increasing globalisation of markets and manufacturers keen to explore the attractiveness of less familiar markets, there has never been a greater need for reliable and accurate data and market intelligence to assist in making important marketing decisions. The development of the internet has meant that there has never been more information readily and easily accessible, which has inevitably resulted in a variety of sources of varying degrees of reliability that should assist in the decision making process.

As the volume has increased, so has the need for a filtering or pre-digesting process to interpret that huge volume of information and turn it into actionable data. One way in which this filtering process is delivered is in the form of published market research reports, and this is particularly the case for transformer markets which are the subject of a plethora of published reports.

Published research vs tailored research

Published market research is inevitably a compromise between providing information that is of interest to a wide base of customers and yet targeted enough to answer specific questions of any purchaser. The benefit is that its cost is much lower than that of the tailored research – by a factor of 10 to 20 times – while the drawback is that it has to be used intelligently, or interpreted to ensure the best use of the information provided in the report. A market research project which is targeted on one specific country can cost the purchaser as much as a published report covering an entire region or even one with global coverage. So, how does that trade-off between cost and depth of information work in practice?

A tailored research project should be designed to provide a large enough budget for a researcher to develop a detailed specification and project plan that will encompass international travel to conduct face-to-face interviews with the senior decision makers who specify, purchase and/or supply transformers. The results of those interviews will be analysed and collated into very detailed market size and market share tables showing suppliers market position and competitive intelligence for the market segment being surveyed. A published report cannot provide the same level of detail, but it can provide sufficient data and competitive information which is detailed enough to provide reliable working data suitable for most marketing needs. Some of the indirect data sources that are available to the authors of published reports are listed below.

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