Barnes and Mullins

Barnes and Mullins

Synergy Statistics – UK Bowed Instrument Market

The latest 2023 Statistical data of the UK MI industry Alan Greensall of Synergy Statistics.

The full year data for 2023 from HMRC is now available and Alan Greensall continues crunching the numbers quickly to help us all determine the true state of the UK MI industry.

After focussing on the important guitar market, we thought it important to have some balance and show what is happening in a more traditional market segment. To that end we have analysed the Bowed instrument (Violins and Cello) to see what happened and if it was different in the out comes.

Following on from the guitar data, the Bowed instrument market replicated the guitar data and shows that It’s not a pretty picture! In numbers being  -41% from the 2022 data which showed a +43% increase over the 2021 data.  So all the gains of 2022 are lost in 2023. However the news is still not good as over the 3 years unit import numbers are down -26%!   

Is there good news in the value of imports?  Sad to say that 43% increase in 2022 numbers only gave a jump of +15% in Value. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that imports of lower value Bowed instruments made up the major share of the market. You can see in the data, who were the winners and who were the losers. The Market is down -19% over the 3 years.The big question is the market growing ?  It did surprise me, that such an established and traditional market was suffering in a similar way to the guitar market. A full 10 year trend analysis is available if you want to know how the value and numbers changed over those pre Covid years. One of my conclusions is that this  must be a reflection of lack of funding in the education sector ?

My previous overrider still remains. : If you’re in distribution or retail buyer here in the UK, this data could be useful in understanding the current market conditions. These statistics are not a true indicator of the market size, as that would need an insight into UK stock holdings and sell through. They are however, a good barometer of the market trends if taken over a sustained period.

The question for the industry, is to why there is long term decline happening in two diverse sectors, and what can they do to stem it? 

Next month’s article will return to another important sector of the MI industry, with the trends for Digital Pianos being exposed . Is it a similar trend? You can of course get in touch and find out.

 

 

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