Luke Hickman on December 20, 2016
Over the past few years, trends in three key indicators have taken hold of some of the larger markets for engineering services. These are:
The direction these indicators take going forward may significantly influence demand for engineering services in their associated market segments.
Luke Hickman on November 28, 2016
Unquestionably, the leading infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud hosting service provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company began offering data storage services in 2006, launching Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) in March of that year, and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) in August.
The service has now been operating for over 10 years, and starting in the first quarter of 2015, Amazon began reporting AWS as a separate segment. In its 2015 Annual Report, Amazon disclosed that AWS net sales expanded from just over $3.1 billion in 2013 to nearly $7.9 billion in 2015. AWS’s revenues have continued to expand rapidly, with the segment experiencing average quarterly growth of 12.5% over the period between Q1 of 2014 and Q2 of 2016, and its revenues for the first half of 2016 already nearly match the first three quarters of 2015.Luke Hickman on October 10, 2016
The expansion of natural gas production in the US has changed the landscape of thermoplastics. The largest building block in the industry, ethylene, can be produced from derivatives of crude oil or natural gas. Over the past few years, the increased production of natural gas in the US, supported by technological improvements related to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, caused the price of natural gas to see average annual declines of 11% between 2005 and 2015. This price shift, along with elevated oil prices throughout the past decade, caused many thermoplastic producers to prefer natural gas over oil in their production of feedstocks.
Luke Hickman on September 19, 2016
In 2014, gymnasium and exercise equipment surpassed golf equipment as the largest sports equipment segment in the US, a position golf equipment had held since 2006. Since that time, many observers have declared the downfall of golf, citing falling participation levels and the millennial cohort’s apparent lack of interest for the game. In addition, the number of open golf courses in the US has taken a tumble in the past decade.
Luke Hickman on July 19, 2016
When it comes to transportation in the US, most people drive themselves. The US Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates for 2014 indicate that about a quarter of American workers get to work primarily by driving themselves. In 2014, there were 214 million licensed drivers in the US, and light vehicles traveled 2.7 trillion miles.
However, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, between 2000 and 2015 consumer spending on public transportation services outgrew spending on new motor vehicles, with the former increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.2 percent and the latter at a CAGR of 1.8 percent. In 2015, consumer spending on public transportation exceeded $100 billion in the US for the first time ever.
