The week between Christmas and New Years Eve is very stressful for most businesses. As Automotive News states December 2014 was a very pleasing months for the US vehicle industry. Last December was filled with good reasons to buy a new car, like big discounts, very little snow and continuously falling gasoline prices. Forecasters say that the U.S. new vehicle sales jumped about ten percent for the last month. This sums up to 16.5 million for the whole of 2014 and already beats the forecasts for 2015. The U.S. light vehicle sales are predicted to hit 17 million in the next year, which would be the first time since 2001. The December volume is estimated at 1.49 to 1.51 million units and therefore an 11 % increase since 2013, which makes this months the second best December ever. The final report for 2014 is coming out on the 5th of January.
At Sunnyside
Toyota in North Olmsted, Ohio the sales since Christmas were up 26 % from the
last week of 2013, which concludes that 2014 was, had a boom in the U.S. vehicle
industry. Experts say that this momentum will continue in 2015, because of
several reasons. First of all the economy is more stable. Adding to that many
car companies are launching new product and this makes customers feel better
about buying new cars. Because of the boom in the car industry many businesses
including LMC have raised their forecasts for 2015. LMC, for example, raised
its 2015 forecast for U.S. sales by 200 000 units to 17 million.
This article relates to our current topic Sales Forecasting, which is a quantitative management technique used to predict a firm's level of sales, in this case the U.S. car industry, over a given time period. Sales Forecasting aplies especially for this, because firms will have to know how their sales were in 2014, to make predictions for the next year. In this case the industry is at the Recovery/Boom of the business cycle and still increasing. Companies would also need to use the 3 point moving averages, to even out the average sales, because in December there might have been more successful than in the summer, which shows that there could also be seasonal differences to the sales. Adding to that the article links to Change of the CUEGIS, because the U.S. vehicle industry is going through a change, which means their sales are immensly increasing, which has not happenend since 2001. Firms have to adapt to this change and need more products/cars if there is more demand from the customers. Lastly this also links to Strategy of the CUEGIS, because sales forecasting is a strategy to predict a company's level of sales over a given time period, which every firm have to use in order to survive in the future. Especially in this time of the year were annual reports of the last year came out and forecasts for the new year were finalized, therefore the topic also fits to the time of the year for the U.S. car industry.
4/4 - a very indepth look at the current affairs case and some good links to the course. Don't forget you could look at external factors affecting businesses and industries too which might give an interesting insight into things and show quantitative sales forecasting alone is not enough.
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