It is starting to look as if 2007 will turn out not be the year most readers had predicted – at least, not if the results of our latest channel survey are anything to go by. Polled last year about business prospects for this year, 76% thought trading would be better than in the previous 12 months while 22% believed they would be the same. However, when we asked them this year how trading conditions had been over the past 12 months, 40% reported they were the same as before and 25% said they were slightly worse. In other words, 65% thought business had been the same or worse in 2007 while only a one in four had detected a slight upturn in trading. A slim margin (4%) claimed the last year’s trading conditions were greatly improved.
It is also worth mentioning that, when we asked readers in 2006 for their views on trading conditions during the previous 12 months, 43% had rated them at slightly improved, 38% indicated business was unchanged, and only 6% thought things were slightly worse. That’s quite a difference. In addition, people appear to be slightly less optimistic looking ahead into 2008, with just over 60% believing business prospects are better than in 2007 and a third suggesting they will remain the same. That’s still very optimistic overall, and it will be interesting to see how accurate those forecasts are given the over-optimism expressed in 2006 for this year’s business climate. David Laird, managing director at Datapac, suggested it was “in the nature of people who run businesses to be optimistic. In fact, you have to be an optimist. If you were not, you would not get out of bed in the morning”. He balanced that view by stressing that people had to “be realistic as well”. Laird described the markets as “very buoyant”, with a lot of spending and investment going on in technology and ICT. “We are not seeing any downturn,” he added. In terms of the nuts and bolts of everyday activity, we asked for the reseller channel’s views on the service provided by their primary distributor and their primary vendor. The figures for vendor service show a slight shift towards the negative compared to the results of our survey last year. While the number satisfied with their vendor increased to from 80% to 85%, those who felt completely satisfied declined from 16% to just 3% – and the numbers of dissatisfied resellers doubled from 5% to 10%.
The stats for distributor service were more or less the same as in 2006, with 79% saying they were satisfied, 12% professing to be completely satisfied and just one in 10 classing themselves as dissatisfied.
Drilling down further into the causes of dissatisfaction with distributor service, we found that just over a fifth were unhappy with the level of service and support – an improvement on 2006, when a third expressed discontent – and a similar number complained about stock availability. Two issues which climber higher up the agenda this time around were unhappiness at the level of marketing and PR support (up from 10% to 17%) and credit terms (a three-fold increase from 4% to 12%).
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