updates: logistics and retail statistics
We help clients and other consultants to source external data for modelling, benchmarking and budgeting. Please contact us to find out how we can help you by ringing 01295 758875 or contacting us.
This series of updates aims to bring government and industry statistics in logistics and retail to life. If you'd like an alert when a fresh update is posted, ask us to email you or follow on Twitter:
Follow @KirstenTisdale
If any detail is unclear in the graphs and maps, please click on the graph itself and then expand the new window that opens.
1 May 2012: Sometimes it pays to be a union member...
On May Day, also known as International Workers' Day in some countries, it's appropriate to look at the impact that trade union membership has on pay. Last week the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills released its annual figures on trade unions. The graph below shows how union membership affects pay, described as the trade union wage premium, for a variety of industries. It can be seen that the effect of membership is not always beneficial to earnings - in the logistics / communication sector, union membership gives an increase in pay, whereas in retail / wholesale the opposite appears true - of course, these figures represent entire sectors, and the same will not always be the case for particular individuals / companies.
There are some excellent graphs in the BIS publication itself including Chart 2.3 on page 12 showing the extent to which union membership has affected pay in both the private and public sector since 1995.
To make this graph BIGGER, please click on the graph itself and then expand the new window that opens.
13 April 2012: HGV reg up, but don't sleep easy
Following DfT news yesterday that HGV registrations are up 34% on 2010, should we all be sleeping content in our beds? ...safe in the knowledge that transport is a leading indicator and where transport goes, GDP follows? No, said William B Cassidy in October about the US market. In that article, he quotes Satish Jindel, president of SJ Consulting Group (who produce the equivalent of Motor Transport's Top 100 for the US). The more GDP shifts toward services, the less relevant freight shipping may become as an overall economic indicator, Jindel argues.
The graph below shows the extent to which goods vehicle registrations have fluctuated in comparison to the change in GDP. This graph shows an annual moving average for vehicle registrations, meaning that each point on the graph represents an average of the whole of the previous year. It's interesting to see just how quickly the van market reacted to the run on Northern Rock in September 2007 and everything that then followed, indicating the extent to which the construction market impacts on this sector. Whereas HGV registrations were still on the increase - another quote from Jindel in Cassidy's article helps to explain: "There's a time lag" for domestic truck and rail carriers handling imported consumer goods, he said. Even if orders and port volumes drop, "the supply chain is already filled with goods moving and they can't stop them."
To make this graph BIGGER, please click on the graph itself and then expand the new window that opens.
NB This graph has been revised, putting GDP on a separate axis to demonstrate the relationship better. Vehicle registrations are for NEW vehicles, not the total parc.
10 April 2012: Paying to keep good drivers
The 26 March edition of Motor Transport featured figures from Nomis, a service from the Office for National Statistics providing UK labour market statistics. LGV Drivers was one of only a few categories included in Motor Transport that had more vacancies than job seekers in February 2012.
The graph below shows how the average earnings of LGV C+E drivers at the upper and lower quartiles has changed since 2006 in real terms relative to the CPI. The data used is for class one drivers in general and isn't new (the last point on the graph is May 2011) - but with tanker drivers back in the news, I thought it an appropriate time to revisit driver pay as a theme. While earnings at the lower quartile level (lower quartile = a quarter of drivers will be earning less), have been eroded over the four and a half years shown, those at the upper quartile level have risen at more than 20% above the rate of inflation over that period, presumably reflecting the need to source and keep good drivers in the country's logistics hot spots.
To make this graph BIGGER, please click on the graph itself and then expand the new window that opens.
The figures in the graph are based on Croner's Distribution & Transport Rewards and the Consumer Price Index. Croner's Distribution & Transport Rewards reports are published annually now - we have extracted data from the September surveys from 2006-10 and the May survey for 2011. The next Croner report is due to be published in July 2012. These reports are available to buy direct from Croner, or if you are a CILT member, you can access the wealth of information by visiting the Knowledge Centre at CILT in Corby.
1 April 2012: Sea levels impacted by shipping volumes
Sea levels are changing and this is generally associated with global warming. However all manner of other factors also influence sea level and these include atmospheric pressure differences, storm surges, seasonal river run-off, tides and tsunamis.
In 2011 a reduction in sea level was detected by NASA satellites and attributed to El Nino becoming La Nina. However examination of the graph below shows that the sea was rising pretty much on a par with the increase of European seafreight tonnage, and that the reduction in sea level followed a marked reduction in seafreight as a result of the economic recession. I don't like to make assumptions, but it appears that, with some delay factor, taking all this weight out of the ocean has let the sea levels go back down.
More recent information from the NASA satellites has shown that the sea level has started rising again, and presumably we will see that there has been an increase in seafreight when the 2010 figures are eventually published.
The data for the graphs was extracted from other graphs and so may not be absolutely accurate. The original sources are NASA and the Europa website.
13 March 2012: Dependent on the Eurozone
Following President Obama's speech on the US economy reported earlier today, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Howard Davies, was asked what that meant for the UK on Radio 4's Today Programme. He opined that one of the reasons the US was picking up a bit more rapidly than the UK, was that the UK was heavily oriented to exports to the Eurozone, whereas the US was much more exposed to the faster growing parts of the world.
He quoted figures indicating that whereas 11% of US exports are to BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the UK figure is half that. Just how dependent we are on exports to the Eurozone can be judged by looking at UK exports to the EU27 in the graph below, which is based on figures for 2011 released by HMRC last week.
To make this graph BIGGER, please please click on the graph itself and then expand the new window that opens.
Thank you to Peter Jeffrey of Logistics Support Services, who commented that the US is less dependent on exports in total and can generate more overall demand from internal markets and internal marketing. He also pointed out that all US strategic defence contracts have to be resourced internally.
22 February 2012: We'll meet again...
The latest SPPI figures were published by the Office of National Statistics earlier today - it's a quarterly index, so the most recent figures are for 2011 Q4. The ONS data no longer includes pre-recession information, and so the graph below includes statistics merged from previous downloads to give a longer perspective.
The impact of the economy on some types of business can be clearly seen in the lack of inflation in courier services rates, while the rates for road freight and national post parcels have just about returned to the same relationship as five years ago ...for the moment, anyway!
To make this graph BIGGER, please right click on the graph itself and ask to "Open link in new tab".
The SPPI is the Service Producers Price Index, and is like a bit like the CPI, but for inflation in services provided to businesses. For a fuller explanation of the SPPI, have a look at this page on the ONS site: SPPI explanation.
As well as the usual static graph, I've also included an INTERACTIVE dataplayer below - unlike the graphs, this doesn't open in another window. It has a number of the SPPI index elements (freight, passenger transport, some of those likely to be of interest to those in logistics...), so you can create your own graph for your own particular areas of interest.
It will look confusing to start with, but in the panel just below the graph, click on the description for the first element you're interested in, and then tick the crosses by one or two other elements. Remember: Click, then tick - go play!
This dataplayer has been created in Omniscope for Visokio - dataplayers can also be created for embedding in PowerPoint slides as part of a report.
14 February 2012: Necessities up, enjoyment down
You'll have read about the rise in inflation elsewhere today. But, as in February last year, this update focuses on the weightings for the Consumer Price Index - these don't show whether inflation is going up or down, but what proportion of household expenditure is spent on the various categories that make up the CPI. The CPI does not include some housing costs such as mortgage interest rates and council tax, but is comparable internationally.
In 2012, as you can see in the graph below, personal transport stays top of the pile at 16.2%. At No2, for the first time this millennium, is the category for housing, water and heating fuels at 14.4%. While the categories for recreation and culture, and for hotels, cafes and restaurants, are a markedly smaller proportion of what we are spending over the last few years. Food is down slightly this year at 11.2%.
I'm always concerned when "Other" is a big slice of any pie, so isn't it about time that there was a new category to separate out some of the elements in miscellaneous goods and services? At 9.6%, it's bigger than clothing (6.5%), and bigger than the three smallest categories combined.
9 February 2012: Freight moved versus emissions
Not an update as such, but a follow up, as several people have asked "So what does the graph of road freight moved look like versus the emissions?" after the update I sent out earlier this week. Here it is - the freight moved figures come from figures the Department for Transport released back in October 2011, and the emissions are as per our 7 February update.
7 February 2012: Good news - HGV emissions up!
Information released earlier today by the Department of Energy & Climate Change showed that in 2010 (latest figures), greenhouse gas emissions from transport represented 21% of the total - the graph below shows how those transport emissions break down for the UK, including Crown Dependencies but excluding Overseas Territories.
The three largest categories are shown split out: cars, HGVs and light duty vehicles (on DfT's website, a light duty truck was defined as being up to 2720kg max gross weight in 2005). My remaining category of 'Other Transport' spans a wide variety of modes including civil aviation, buses, mopeds & motorcycles, LPG emissions (all vehicles), other road vehicle engines, railways, national navigation, fishing vessels, military aircraft / shipping and aircraft support vehicles. The measure used is million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), and is used in international reporting and carbon trading.
The element that is attributable to cars dwarfs the other categories and is plotted against the left hand axis, while the remainder including Other Transport are plotted against the right hand axis. So, it can be seen that cars represent almost exactly three times as much emission as HGVs. But the real news is that final tail-flick in the trace for HGVs - DfT figures released in October last year showed a marked increase in the road freight moved in 2010 compared with 2009, and that uplift is reflected in this graph.
21 January 2012: Why the high street is in decline
I don't usually do two updates in a week, but statistics can be like buses ...you wait for ages and then several good ones come along!
The Office of National Statistics released Retail Sales data for December yesterday - the figures revealed that, despite all the headlines of woe, we did manage to spend coming on 8% more money than in 2010. The graph below is a twelve month moving average from five years' worth of data, resulting in a four year trace, and shows why the high street is in such decline - the proportion of our money that we've been spending on a combination of fuel for our cars (up more than 22% year on year) and shopping done online instead of in town (+28% YOY), has gone from less than a seventh to nearly £1 in £5 in the matter of just a few years ...and that's before the impact of out-of-town developments over the years.
19 January 2012: Retail vacancies - going down
Yesterday the Office of National Statistics released information on the number of unfilled vacancies at the end of 2011, as well as the more widely reported unemployment figures. For those interested in logistics and retail, there were 20K and 66K vacancies in those sectors respectively, and the total number of vacancies in the UK in the last quarter of the year was 463K, excluding agriculture, forestry and fishing, which is a tiny sector.
The graph below shows the number of vacancies per 100 employee jobs over the last five years. The logistics sector follows the overall UK rate reasonably closely, but retail vacancies, while often mirroring the shape of the curve for the whole economy, runs at a higher rate. However, it can also be seen that the number of retail vacancies started to dip recently - is this because those jobs have been filled, or have retailers stopped looking for staff? It shouldn't be the impact of peak, as the ONS figures are seasonally adjusted.
If you're interested in how employment changes with the health of the economy, here's an update on the Office for National Statistics website on GDP and the Labour Market, released a few days after this was posted.
6 January 2012: Impact of banking crisis on freight
The first week of January is always a good time for looking forward, so I'm not going to let the fact that these figures were published by IATA, the Air Transport Association, in December get in the way. In the words of CAPA Centre for Aviation "IATA has unusually provided two forecast scenarios for 2012 - a 'central forecast' and 'banking crisis' forecast - or perhaps more accurately, the 'bad' and 'worse' forecasts".
The graph below shows actuals for the years 2006 to 2010 and forecasts for 2011 and 2012 for both the revenue raised by air cargo and also the volume of airfreight. If there is a banking crisis resulting from the Eurozone difficulties, the volume of freight is forecast to change so little that you can hardly see the bright pink line nestling behind the lighter blue Central Forecast. However, the impact on cargo revenue can be seen clearly where the red line drops down from the darker blue one.
For those interested in exploring this more, including the passenger side of the industry, here are IATA's press release from December, and the IATA forecasts.
Best wishes for a successful 2012 - let's all hope for better than IATA's forecasts for the economy as a whole!
21 December 2011: Wage rates converge
Late last week the Office for National Statistics released its Index of Labour Costs per Hour (ILCH). Those of you who receive these updates regularly will know that I often use a five year timeframe - it gives a good perspective, particularly with the economic situation over the last few years, but without going into ancient history. The basis for this update was going to be how the increase in wage costs in Transport & Storage compared with the highest and lowest risers over the five year period, but when I looked at the data, a different story emerged. So this time, I've given a longer perspective, and you'll see why when you look at the graph below, which shows an annual moving average.
I included Manufacturing of Chemicals and Man-Made Fibres as it showed the most marked increase in hourly wage costs over the last five years, but it's clear that those working in this industry lost out for a while starting in about 2005. In contrast, those employed in "Other Service Activities" (an interesting mish-mash including the activities of membership organisations, various repairs, dry cleaning, hairdressing and funerals...) appear to have enjoyed above average pay increases starting in about 2005, but were the group that showed the greatest reduction in hourly wages more recently. The overall picture for hourly wage/salary costs appears to be one of convergence, but with rates in Transport and Storage showing even progress over the whole period and rising above those for the economy as a whole, particularly recently.
28 November 2011: International rates down
The latest SPPI figures were published by the Office of National Statistics last week - it's a quarterly index, so the most recent figures are for 2011 Q3. The ONS data no longer includes pre-recession information, and so the graph below includes statistics merged from previous downloads to give a longer perspective.
Inflation in road freight rates continued its constant climb after the slight wobble following the start of the recession. The index for sea freight fell back for the first time since starting its rise at the beginning of 2010 - these figures are not seasonally adjusted and this index shows no particular inclination to drop at this time of year. And freight forwarding carried on with the deflation in rates from last quarter ...it's not an index that shows particular seasonal tendencies, but this is the first time in ten years that this index hasn't risen in the third quarter.
The SPPI is the Service Producers Price Index, and is like a bit like the CPI, but for inflation in services provided to businesses. For a fuller explanation of the SPPI, have a look at this page on the ONS site: SPPI explanation.
18 November 2011: Manic Monday on the way!
We're approaching Manic or Cyber Monday, the biggest day of the internet sales year - forecast to be 28 November this year. The peaking, not only of actual sales, but also the growing peak as a proportion of total retail sales can be seen in the graph below. The figures, released by the Office of National Statistics yesterday, cover the period November 2006 to October 2011.
The impact on high streets and logistics will vary region by region. Figures from a Q3 2011 survey, also released by the ONS earlier this week, show the variation in internet use: 27.2% of people in Northern Ireland have never used the internet at all, compared with 11.4% in parts of the South East.
10 October 2011: Transport & storage in negative territory
Last week the Office of National Statistics released details of UK business activity. The graph below shows how the number of business locations has increased or reduced between 2010 and 2011, and before that between 2010 and 2009. The change is shown as a percentage, so the relative impact on each sector can be seen. It won't surprise anyone in the logistics industry to find that Transport & Storage businesses have decreased in number on both occasions.
The raw statistics are based on the number of local units in VAT and / or PAYE based enterprises - a local unit is described as the equivalent of an individual shop or factory, or presumably in our industry, an individual DC or depot. The data for 2011 is taken from a snapshot at 28 March 2011. Because the ONS recently changed to categorising businesses using the SIC 2007 codes, it's not easy to make direct comparisons looking further back. But I can report that Transport (on its own, rather than combined with Storage) suffered one of the larger percentage losses in the period 2008 to 2009.
Someone, glancing over my shoulder while I was preparing this earlier, said they were heartened to see the Finance industry on the mend!
20 September 2011: When Asda and the TUC say the same thing...
When the Distribution Director of Asda and the General Secretary of the TUC say the same thing, you've got to sit up and take notice ...and that is what's happened with strikes. At the CILT West Midlands SCALA debate in July, Ian Stansfield warned that he thought there would be an increase in industrial disputes going forward. And last week Brendan Barber was reported on the BBC's website as saying that the nationwide "day of action" on 30 November could bring "the biggest trade union mobilisation for a generation", including strikes and rallies.
So how does our industry's record for labour disputes compare with other sectors? The graph below is based on data published by the Office of National Statistics last week. The green element of the bars representing a combination of transport, storage, information and communication, and the grey elements representing all other sectors in the UK. The measure used is thousands of days lost, and the figures are not seasonally adjusted. The recent public sector strike in June 2011 can be clearly seen, and also the last time there were large strikes in the wider transport industry, with a combination of Royal Mail and bus strikes in October 2009.
Barrie Dowsett of BJD Group asked what the relative size of the sectors were - the two sectors that were amalgamated in the strike figures, Transport & Storage and Information & Communication, represent 9% of workers, but 21% of working days lost over the whole period shown.
6 September 2011: What are you buying online?
Earlier today the British Retail Consortium reported on retail activity in August, noting that non-food non-store sales growth had picked up the most since April, with sales 12.6% higher than a year ago. NB This category includes mail-order and phone as well as internet.
So what are people spending their money on? At the end of August, the Office for National Statistics published the results of its 2011 survey of internet usage, reporting on what the internet is used for, how and where it's being accessed, and what people are buying online. The graph below shows the categories being purchased and how that varies by gender - the biggest differences are in areas such as video games, computer-related and electronic purchases, with men much more likely to buy.
As noted by the ONS in their own report, half of female internet users purchased clothes/sporting goods online in 2011, the most popular purchase by women by some margin ...although it needs to be noted that it was also the biggest category for men, before we have too much joking from the male chauvinists out there!
If you'd like to see older updates on a wide variety of subjects, please visit this link for archive updates.