Market Focus: Innovation

One question analysts, experts, consultants, and (sometimes) editors in the injection molding industry hear quite often goes something like this: "Just how big is the [insert your market of interest here] market?" Everyone knows the automotive market is big, but just how big is it compared to the medical market, or the housewares market? Is it really, really big, or just sort of big? The data below attempt to answer that question.

Phillip Townsend Assoc., based in Houston, has compiled the Plastic Buyer Profiles database and uses it to track what many of the country's molders are doing - what markets they serve, what kinds of materials they use, how much material they use, how many presses they have, and scads of other data. Although Phillip Townsend does not have data for every molder in the country, it does for a lot (thousands), and the information culled from what the company has collected is certainly representative of the injection molding industry on the whole.

One way to characterize the size of a market is to measure how much resin is consumed by molders serving that market. Phillip Townsend compiled this data for IMM, showing market size by the amount of resin consumed for a given year. The data below combine information for parts of both 1996 and 1997. Although this may not be an absolute measure of market size, it does give you a feel for how markets compare with one another, relatively speaking. The bars on the chart show how much resin, expressed in millions of pounds, is consumed by molders in each market.