Saturday, August 01, 2009

WIMA and Stats

Just a little snippet from the WIMA (Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association) website. This association covers Mexico, USA and Canada. There are other WIMA's for other countries and areas, e.g. JWIMA, CWIMA.

Some WIMA stats for the 2007 statistical year:

Pencil Products
Wood Encased – 3.803 billion units shipped, $388 mil manufacturers sales value.
Mechanical – 565 million units shipped, $652 mil manufacturers sales value.
Colored – 707 million units shipped, $147 mil manufacturers sales value.

So in North America that makes the average woodcase graphite pencil US 10.2 cents, and the average mechanical pencil US $1.15, at manufacturers invoiced value.

So many questions. I guess the figures of non-WIMA companies are excluded? Also, whats a "unit"? Is a three-pack of wooden pencils in a hang-sell polybag one unit or three?

4 comments:

Penmaniacs said...

cool stats, definently not what i was expecting. 1.15 for a mechanical pencil on average. must be the bics.

Anonymous said...

That's not end user / consumer prices. That's what the manufacturer gets

Andrew said...

These are some great stats for offices. the fact that the ratio of purchased wooden pencils to mechanical pencils is 7:1 and the cost is about 1:11 shows that companies get almost 57% more value from wooden pencils.

Kiwi-d said...

Hi Andrew. I'm not sure we can draw that conclusion from this limited data. The data is manufacturers sales value so different retail margins could affect your final end-user value calculation. Then there's the refilling of MP's, and the assumption that $1 of wooden pencil writes as long as $1 of mechanical pencil.