industrials Blog Articles

Polaris plant traffic

Polaris – CEO “The good news is we haven't seen it get significantly weaker relative to where we were expecting”

April 30, 2025

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights

Polaris makes snowmobiles, motorcycles, ATVs, and power boats – all big-ticket discretionary goods, a category of consumer expenditure that has been in a world of hurt following a pandemic / fiscal stimulus fueled super-cycle in 2021 / ‘22. Higher...

Tesla traffic

Tesla – Operations Is Hitting The Brakes Hard

March 10, 2025

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights

Production activity at Freemont, Austin, and Berlin has stepped meaningfully lower in February, accentuating the negative trend at year end. Clearly, Tesla’s sales and operations team are observing a slackening in demand, confirming industry and press...

SiteOne traffic

SiteOne Landscape Supply

February 13, 2025

SiteOne’s business and results are interesting these days as they provide a read on the results of immigration policy on industries heavily dependent on immigrants, extreme weather and natural disasters, commodity inflation, and housing. The latter three of these were impactful to SiteOne’s Q4 as...

Amazon activity

Amazon Efficiency

February 10, 2025

What struck us about Amazon’s Q4 results was the significant upside in its North America margins and profits; margins hit 8.0% vs. the expectation of 6.5% (BBG) and EBIT hit $9.3B vs. the expectation of $7.4B. Amazon has worked diligently to lower the cost to serve since early 2023 by staging...

US ports yoy foot traffic growth

Tracking the Impact of the Dockworkers Strike with Location Data Insights

October 1, 2024

With the dockworkers’ strike that started at midnight disrupting port operations across the East and Gulf Coasts, it’s essential to understand how this will affect the flow of goods into and out of the U.S. Ports are critical infrastructure points, and the impact of strikes or delays can reflect...

Toyota - Ford - General Motors employees

TOYOTA (TM): Immune to Shortages and Supply Chain Headwinds

November 11, 2021

Automotive is one of the industries that has been struggling with chip shortages, supply chain issues and labor shortages for months now. But do all the carmakers struggle at the same level? To answer the question, we employed Advan’s foot traffic data for two US automakers and one Japanese: Ford...

Deere employees

How Many Replacement Non-Union Workers is Deere Using?

November 3, 2021

Workers at Deere & Co. (DE), the world’s top agriculture equipment manufacturer, walked out of its factories to demand better pay and health benefits, a move that had not be seen in over 30 years, and while the company is on track for its most successful year ever. The strike started on Oct. 14...

Employee traffic

Ford Says Chip Shortage Forcing Production Halt at Several Plants

April 1, 2021

Following the recent news that Ford is expected to halt production for two weeks in April due to chip shortages, and given our recent study on this exact subject few months back we wanted to take a closer look and quantify how the largest US carmakers and the industry as a whole is currently...

Tempur Sealy factory traffic

Mattress sales are soaring, bedding manufacture's activity confirms

February 15, 2021

It’s been a year now into full or partial lockdowns, social distancing rules and work from home as a result of the COVID crisis which unequivocally forced people to spend more time into their homes and consequently to change their shopping habits - reconsidering what is essential and therefore set...

Ford, GM and Fiat/Chrysler

Carmakers are facing a new challenge: Chip Shortages

February 5, 2021

After the lockdown last spring that forced manufacturers from all sectors to halt production, auto makers now have to face another challenge: the global chip shortage due to the high demand on consumer electronics (laptops, gaming consoles, TVs etc.). The increased need for the technology devices...

Carlisle YoY Correlation

Foot Traffic to Manufacturing Facilities Shows Over 90% Correlation with Revenues

October 6, 2020

For investors, foot traffic data is fast becoming a critical weapon as part of an alternative data armory. The value of tracking real-time visitation numbers to retail and consumer-facing compa-nies is widely recognized. Yet, as we explore here, measuring traffic to industrial companies can offer...

Consumer Discretionaries traffic

Rebound at Consumer Discretionary Businesses Reinforces Differences Between States

July 1, 2020

In this third blog post of our summer series, we review two different measures of economic activity that can help paint an overall picture of consumer trends.

Measuring foot traffic at consumer discretionary businesses helps us understand the extent to which people are back to shopping for...