Loving data and having lots to share I will be posting a brief market overview each month through my blog. So lets crack on, what happened last month?

May 2015

After a slow start the UK market has seen some positive growth year to date. Total value at the end of May was up 2.33% v 2014. Here’s a nice little graph to show you the trends. The graph shows the change in YTD value versus the previous year. You can see that 2015 (Purple line) started behind 2014 in the first three months but a good April and May has pulled 2015 ahead. Note the trend in the last 3 years where big initial changes have  settled down to produce small single figure annual differences.

Balls, gloves and trolleys have shown positive growth in both value and volume. The former being a good indication that play is up on last year. So it would appear that people are out on the course.

Not all categories have faired so well. Woods, Irons and weatherwear are down on last year. The latter being hit hard due to the better weather. The main drop in the two large hardware categories has come from falling volumes. Woods are down 11% and Irons 7% YTD.

ASP’s are up across all categories versus 2014 and this is the main cause for increased value sales. Putters have increased the most with a year to date rise of 13.7%. Lets hope that the additional value has helped drive some extra margin for retailers.

All in all the non club categories seem to be driving the market, which again should give retailers the opportunity to generate some much needed margin.

Next month is looking positive so far. I would hope that the lack of any major football or sporting events should allow the golf market to have a healthy June and July. That should give us the chance to regain some of the loss from the previous years. Year to date we are still 7.6% down on the same time in 2012!!

Fingers crossed for fair weather!

Data all courtesy of Golf Datatech – www.golfdatatech.com