Forecasting the development of the market for business telephones in the UK

The problem of producing medium- to long-term forecasts of the market for business telephones is examined. Growth curves are generally appropriate for forecasting developing markets. However, this market is particularly sensitive to the state of business confidence and the feasibility of incorporating explanatory economic variables into the forecasting model is investigated. Three different model types are compared: growth curves with a fixed saturation level, multivariate linear models and growth curves with saturation levels determined by explanatory variables. The initial promise of models using explanatory variables is considerably diminished, once forecast rather than actual values of these variables are used. The market development model implicit in the growth curve is shown to be more robust than the linear model. Although the variable saturation level growth curve grants more insight into the maturity of the market, it does not produce significantly better forecasts than that with the fixed saturation level.