What’s new in the BMBI and PHMI reports?
Why are we making the changes?
BMBI, and PHMI, readers will notice a few changes in the way we present builders’ merchant sales data in the reports. One of the aims is to give more prominence to like-for-like sales metrics which, adjusted for trading day differences, give a better and more consistent measure of activity than unadjusted total value sales.
Most merchants use both unadjusted sales values and like-for-like measures, adjusted for trading days, to give them an accurate steer on the market. But this change in emphasis was triggered by requests from national merchants and larger regionals to make more of like-for-like, which is their primary measure of sales trends. Smaller merchants and suppliers tend to use unadjusted metrics as their primary metric.
Following other useful feedback, we’ve made other improvements and will be making more small improvements to the presentation of BMBI, and PHMI, reports in the next few months. If you have any suggestions on these measures, or thoughts on how we can improve our reporting of the data, please get in touch via https://bmbi.co.uk/contact-us/ or, for PHMI, https://phmi.co.uk/contact/.
What is different?
Value sales
Total (unadjusted) value sales – these are value (£) sales that have not been adjusted to remove the effect of trading days. Any % changes between periods will therefore be a combination of movements in £ sales as well as the differences in trading days (if there are any).
The BMBI and PHMI summaries and reports have always included this measure of value sales and will continue to do so.
Like-for-like value sales – these are value (£) sales that have been adjusted to remove the effect of trading day differences between periods. You can be confident, therefore, that any % changes between periods are due to movements in £ sales rather than differences in the number of trading days.
Although the BMBI and PHMI reports have always included like-for-like value sales, a recent change is that we are bringing this measure more to the forefront of our summaries and reports and we now consider it to be the lead measure.
Volume sales
Total (unadjusted) volume sales – these are volume (unit) sales that have not been adjusted to remove the effect of trading days. Any % changes between periods will therefore be a combination of movements in unit sales as well as the differences in trading days (if there are any).
The BMBI and PHMI summaries have always included this measure of volume sales and will continue to do so.
Like-for-like volume sales – these are volume (unit) sales that have been adjusted to remove the effect of trading day differences between periods. You can be confident, therefore, that any % changes between periods are due to movements in unit sales rather than differences in the number of trading days.
This will be a new measure in the BMBI and PHMI summaries from the Q4 2025 reports.
Price
Price is a Unit Sales Price, calculated from the Value (£) sales and Volume (units) sales. The appropriate unit varies by category. For example, units can be containers, pallets, packs, bags, cans of paint, rolls of insulation, lengths, boards or sheets of drylining.
Total (unadjusted) price – this is the unit sales price calculated from the Total (unadjusted) value sales and Total (unadjusted) volume sales.
The BMBI and PHMI summaries have always included this measure of price and will continue to do so.
Like-for-like price will always equate to total unadjusted price.
This will be a new measure in the BMBI and PHMI summaries from the Q4 2025 reports.
Mike Rigby, Managing Director – MRA Research
