Both sales and employment showed growth for the first time since February in AVIXA’s latest monthly Pro-AV business index, reflecting the trends for July 2020.
The AVIXA Pro-AV business index gives a snapshot of the health of the industry in sales and employment based on a scale from 0 to 100, with any number above 50 indicating growth in that segment. For July 2020, sales moved from 50.3 to 53.7, while employment jumped from 48.2 to 51.3.
“There’s still a long road ahead, as this month’s figure represents only slow growth,” according to AVIXA in reference to the sales figures for July 2020. “But the operative word is ‘growth,’ and all signs point to it continuing.”
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The employment number in the latest Pro AV business index is “more a sign of steady payrolls than growth, but it is still encouraging,” according to the AVIXA report.
“Comparing our international respondents to our North American respondents shows that this increase was driven largely by U.S. growth,” the report says.
Inside the Pro-AV Business Index
Payrolls added 1.8 million workers—500,000 of them at restaurants and bars—as the unemployment rate dropped to 10.2% but “payroll growth shows clear signs of deceleration.”
Job growth in June was more than twice as fast as it was in July and initial unemployment claims have steadied at over 1 million per week—well above the pre-pandemic record, according to the AVIXA report.
AVIXA has published the Pro-AV business index every month since September 2016 to gauge sales and employment across the industry. The survey behind the AVIXA Pro-AV Business Index was fielded to 2,000 members of the AVIXA Insights Community, July 27 to Aug. 4 by 373 members of AVIXA’s Insights Community.
Only respondents who are service providers and said they were “moderately” to “extremely” familiar with their company’s business conditions were factored in Index calculations.
The AV sales and AV employment indexes are computed as diffusion indexes, with the monthly score calculated as the percentage of firms reporting a significant increase plus half the percentage of firms reporting no change. Comparisons are always made to the previous month.
