Originally posted by rangercarp General Motors just announced they will no longer report sales on a monthly basis. They will report sales quarterly going forward. It seems there is too much short term fluctuation and the month to month numbers can be misleading. I would be okay id CIPA did the same.
It's only parenthetically related to this thread, but when I worked for Ford Motor Company in the eighties, auto sales in Canada and the U.S. were reported every 10 days, even though bonuses were paid monthly and quarterly. From a
Bloomberg report "The auto industry began reporting monthly U.S. sales in late 1990, when then-Chrysler Corp. was first to make the switch away from releasing deliveries figures every 10 days, the Detroit News reported. GM followed suit three years later..."
CIPA is just a clearing house for statistics, supported by camera manufacturers. Each participating manufacturer submits their actual results, CIPA aggregates the data and publishes reports that don't reveal how individual manufacturers are doing compared to other manufacturers. Lots of industries have similar arrangements, the North American auto industry is unusual in that sales by model are reported, so it is very simple to determine which marketing programs of your competitors are successful and which aren't. Which also explains why auto manufacturers want to go to longer reporting periods, because it takes away an excuse for dealers to decline to commit to long term order commitments.
If your business is manufacturing or selling cars or cameras, you know perfectly well what constitutes a trend and what doesn't. In the absence of data that is timely and has sufficient precision, you have to guess (or gamble) and costly mistakes get made. Any push to reduce the amount of useful public data is driven by executives who don't want to pay the price for their costly mistakes. Like devaluing currency, once one major industry player stops providing data, the value of all industry statistics drops.