Market forecasting assists plans for major infrastructure development programme
One of the UK’s largest telecommunications infrastructure and service providers is currently undertaking a 5 year multi-billion infrastructure investment programme.
To ensure they closely matched their resources to the expected demand for their new services, they needed to understand the size and expected growth trends in eight target markets. They also wanted to assess the top residential and commercial developers’ awareness and views towards the new service proposition.
They asked Leading Edge to determine how each target market is currently performing in terms of construction output and how this was likely to change up to 2015. The organisation also wanted figures for the number of new units to be constructed each year over the period.
We started by developing a causal model to forecast construction output in each sector, which we then qualified with extensive desk research to provide a five year trend. We then analysed over 5,000 project planning leads from 2008/09 to assess the number of new units constructed over that period. By using the output from the construction forecast models, we were able to provide figures that demonstrated the scale of opportunity in new build developments for each market.
We also targeted and achieved telephone interviews with senior executives with 20 of the UK’s top developers within a tight timeframe. The research provided vital insights into the key market trends, barriers to entry and attitudes towards telecommunications infrastructure providers and the services they offer.
We presented the findings to the senior team, which clearly highlighted the key trends in each sector and revealed that awareness of the new proposition among developers was limited, although there was a high level of interest in the concept.
The organisation will be using our forecast figures to feed into their business plans for tracking demand and developing relationships with the key developers in their target markets.