How Are the “Big Guys” Doing?
On the furniture supply side, only a handful of companies are public with regularly published financial results. Instead, ours is an industry of hundreds of privately held manufacturing and import companies ranging from tiny start-ups to behemoths like Haworth. Of these many players, only Haworth publishes its results, so getting a handle on how the whole industry performed is a challenge. BIFMA collects statistics from its members, but beginning with the April 2016 report, BIFMA launched new reporting protocols, broadening the scope of the survey to include North America companies (Canada and Mexico) versus previously only reporting numbers from U.S. manufacturers. The new methodology ostensibly made reporting simpler, increased incentives for companies to report, and broadened the categories covered in the survey to include institutional furniture in vertical markets such as healthcare and education. So by April of this year BIFMA should be in a much better position to report …
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