The Truth in Sales Reporting, Before You Dare To Compare You Must Read This
Agent009 submitted on 5/2/2007 Official Bell & Ross Timestamp: 2:15:44 PM
23 user comments | Category: Misc News | Source: www.autospies.com
Every month we keep you up to
date on the latest in sales from biggest automakers. But if you look at the numbers closely you
may see the hidden facts behind the PR department’s smoke and mirrors game.
I will come out and say right
here, that all reporting of sales on AutoSpies is basically the press release
from the manufacturer as posted through a variety of legitimate news outlets. But if you try to take the figures and
compare against the competition you will find some of you may have oranges
while others have apples. The figures
just don’t compare and here is why.
The Germans tend to report
sales strictly based off of the raw sales numbers. Basically you are up or down in sales
according to the month. So if you sold 9,500
vehicles this month vs. 10,000 vehicles for the same month last year, you have
posted a 5.0% decrease in sales or a drop of 500 units. Brutally honest and simple and paints a potentially
stark picture for your investors on that month’s sales activities.
Now the Japanese (and the Americans to some extent)
tend to look at it a bit differently and step in and may say the Germans are
doing it all wrong. They prefer to
factor in that this month you only have 24 selling days vs. 26 last year, so
you have to base on your average “Daily Selling Rate” to get a true figure. While this seems fair, it does paint a far different
picture. Let’s take the example above
and compute the figures according to this new philosophy.
If you remember we sold 9,500
cars for the month vs. 10,000 for the same period last year. The only difference
is that last year we had 2 more selling days than this year. After computation
we now can successfully claim that our 5.0% drop in sales is now almost 3.0%
GAIN in sales for the month based on the “Daily Sales Rate”. Yet we still sold 500
less vehicles. So we post a sales gain percentage
to the press and the average person on the street sees the
percentages and look no further.
Why is this possible? It
basically boils down to the fact that there are two acceptable way of reporting
sales that yield marked differences in perception. If we run a few of the major players with
differing reporting methods for last month we see the following.
Toyota, Honda, VW, and Nissan all posted less sales numerically
than last year and posted declines in raw percentages. But if we change those to a DSR method three
of the four now show sales gains.
Now if we take Acura’s dismal
sales last month we can see by reporting it based on DSR, we get a change from
a 21.5% decline with a raw figure to a slightly better 15% decline, still bad
but better numerically. Lexus’ raw
increase of 5.33% now translates to an adjusted increase of 14.11% much more favorable
in the eyes of the beholder.
The purpose of this exercise
is to warn you to look close at the figures to see what is really going on, and
never take a percentage as a reality. They can be deceiving. Many of the posts by our readers are based
purely on the percentages not the raw figures.
Both are correct to a degree but it is easy to put you foot in your
mouth and think your are doing better than you really
are.
|
|
April
|
April
|
|
Based on
|
Based on
|
|
|
2007
|
2006
|
Delta
|
Raw Data
|
DSR
|
|
Acura
|
15193
|
19372
|
-4179
|
-21.57%
|
-15.04%
|
|
Infiniti
|
9945
|
9618
|
327
|
3.40%
|
12.02%
|
|
Lexus
|
25995
|
24679
|
1316
|
5.33%
|
14.11%
|
|
Audi
|
8106
|
7412
|
694
|
9.36%
|
18.48%
|
|
BMW
|
25310
|
25250
|
60
|
0.24%
|
8.59%
|
|
Mercedes
Benz
|
20895
|
21270
|
-375
|
-1.76%
|
6.42%
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Honda
|
111226
|
119752
|
-8526
|
-7.12%
|
0.62%
|
|
Nissan
|
61179
|
77102
|
-15923
|
-20.65%
|
-14.04%
|
|
Toyota
|
184462
|
195286
|
-10824
|
-5.54%
|
2.33%
|
|
VW
|
19086
|
20528
|
-1442
|
-7.02%
|
0.72%
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Blue indicates
the figure reported to the press by the manufacturer
|