This article gives an overview of all the chapters and sections in Industry Reports. Its format follows the table of contents in the left-hand menu of all Industry Reports.

For information on different types of industry reports, read Industry Report Collections and Industry Report Templates.

The About This Industry page helps you confirm you’re in the right place with a quick definition of the industry, its products and services, major companies and other key identifiers.

You can access this page at the top of any industry report's left navigation menu.

We create holistic and concise industry definitions to give you a broad understanding of the industry by enhancing definitions from statistical agencies (e.g., the US Census Bureau, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the UK Office of National Statistics, and the German Federal Statistical Office).

This section outlines and defines industry-specific terms found throughout the report. For more general research-related terms found in all industry reports, see our Glossary.

This section clarifies the types of businesses and business activity included in an industry. This information helps you understand if you’re in the right report.

This section lists the top companies that currently hold the highest percentage of the industry’s market share. Click on the company names to jump to an overview of the company’s performance in the Companies chapter.

This section includes industries in the same sector and industries that complement and are similar to the industry.

When you first open an industry report, you will land in the At a Glance chapter.

This chapter gives you an overview of key industry information found throughout the report so you can quickly get up to speed on an industry.

You can click on any section heading containing an arrow to jump to the corresponding full section within the report.

The At a Glance chapter will appear differently in US and Canada Industry Reports for commercial bankers. To learn more, read At a Glance for Bankers.

The Key Takeaways section gives you a quick preview of the performance and external trends affecting the industry. It also shows high-level performance data and trends. Click “Go to chapter” under “Performance” or “External Environment” to dive deeper into the data and trends.

Every chapter in industry reports includes a Key Takeaways section at the beginning of the chapter summarizing the most important trends.

This section outlines the key offerings within the industry, detailing the revenue contribution of each segment to highlight the most significant revenue streams for industry operators.

We use the standard definition of a major player: a company that operates primarily within an industry and generates over 5% of the industry's revenue. For each industry, we identify up to six major players. Click the section title for more details on the distribution of market share in the Companies chapter of the report.

Key External Drivers are factors beyond the control of industry operators that influence industry performance, such as exchange rates, commodity prices, consumer attitudes, climate, and government policies. Click on the Key External Drivers in the table to explore them further in the External Environment chapter.

This section details the level and trend of key industry characteristics found throughout the report. Click on the characteristics in the table to learn more.

The SWOT analysis covers the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing industry operators. You can use this assessment to gain a comprehensive understanding of industry dynamics to make informed and strategic decisions.

The Executive Summary provides a concise, three-paragraph overview of industry performance, covering the past five years, current trends, and a forecast for the next five years. This section maintains a consistent structure across all industry reports.

The Performance chapter examines historical, current, and forecasted industry performance, along with industry volatility and life cycle analysis, providing insights into the industry's health and trajectory.

The Performance Snapshot section features an interactive graph that tracks historical, current, and forecasted industry performance. Click through the tabs at the top of the graph to explore changes in revenue, employees, businesses and profit over time.

To download this chart, or any chart in the report, click the PNG or CSV download options at the bottom of the chart. Learn how to download the whole report or individual chapters in our Downloading Content article.

In this section, the analyst unpacks what’s driving industry performance.

You can view the analysis in paragraph or bullet-point format using our Paragraph Builder tool. This feature is available for select analyses throughout the report.

This section helps you understand how volatile an industry is, its growth versus volatility and insight into what’s currently influencing volatility for the industry.

The Outlook section examines the key factors driving the five-year performance forecast, highlighting potential threats and opportunities such as government regulations, policy changes, shifts in the industry life cycle, changes in barriers to entry, evolving growth strategies, and expectations for major players.

The Life Cycle section highlights where an industry and similar industries fall in the industry life cycle.

The industry life cycle consists of the following phases:

The Life Cycle chart shows an industry's current position by plotting the relationship between its change in contribution to the economy and the percentage change in the number of industry establishments.

Below the chart, we analyze why the industry is in its current life cycle phase.

The Products and Markets chapter covers an industry’s products and services, markets and trends in international trade.

This section details the products and services operators in an industry provide and the size of each segment. Product and service shares are calculated based on the current year's revenue.

This section’s analysis covers economic factors affecting industry performance and trends and changes in innovation affecting product and service segments.

The Major Markets section outlines the primary buyers of the industry’s products and services. The chart displays each market’s size based on current-year revenue, with markets segmented into other industries, final consumers or overseas buyers.

The Major Markets analysis below the chart highlights what’s influencing demand for each segment.

The International Trade interactive map shows the value of industry imports and exports for each country. You can toggle between imports and exports in the map.

This section, along with the following Imports and Exports sections, is only available for industries that import or export goods.

This section analyzes what’s driving current import trends.

This section analyzes what’s driving current Export trends.

The Geographic Breakdown chapter analyzes regional trends and business concentrations, offering insights to understand the business landscape, identify opportunities and perform regional benchmarking.

The interactive Business Concentration map shows the concentration of establishments by state, province or territory in a country.

US and Canada Industry Report subscribers can click on any state or province in the map to jump to the corresponding State or Provincial Industry Report.

Below the chart and accompanying data table, the analyst details why the industry is located where it is, trends in operator locations and the movements of those trends. The business locations analysis includes a chart comparing establishments and populations across the country's regions.

Following the Porter’s Five Forces framework, this chapter gives you data and insights on what’s driving competition in an industry and the challenges industry operators and new entrants may face.

The Market Share Concentration chart shows how much of the industry’s market share is controlled by its top four operators, expressed as a percentage.

The market share of the top four operators is calculated by dividing the revenue generated by an operator by the current year's industry revenue.

You can also compare this percentage to the sector average, which represents the average market share concentration of the top four operators across all industries within the sector.

Use the analysis accompanying the chart to understand the factors impacting trends in market share concentration. The analysis includes a chart with insight into the size of companies holding the most market share in the industry.

The Barriers to Entry section assesses the obstacles new businesses face when entering an industry, such as high startup costs, strict regulations or strong incumbent competition. This section includes the level and trend of barriers to entry and analysis detailing the potential challenges new industry entrants may face.

This section helps you understand the alternatives to an industry, their level and trend and insight into why customers may turn to these other options.

The Supply Chain chart in the Buyer and Supplier Power section maps the upstream and downstream industries in the supply chain.

You can click into any industry in the supply chain chart to jump to that industry’s report.

Gain more insight into who has influence across an industry’s supply chain with trends and analysis on the different power held by buyers and suppliers below the chart.

The Companies chapter provides data, trends and insights on the businesses holding the largest market shares in the industry.

The Industry Market Share by Company chart displays the percentage of total market share held by the top companies compared to the combined market share of all other companies in the industry.

You can click into the years at the bottom of the chart to see the change in distribution of market share over the past five years.

The Companies section includes a data table of all the companies included in the report and an overview of each company.

The company overview includes a description, company details (performance highlights), brands and trading names, other industries the company is in and a graph charting the company’s revenue, market share and profit margin over time.

Use the drop-down menu to view the company overview for all the top companies listed.

Subscribers to US Industry Reports can click “Go to report” in the Company Benchmarking sub-section to view the Company Benchmarking report for that company.

The External Environment chapter explores the demographic, economic and regulatory factors influencing the industry.

The External Drivers section covers the demographic and macroeconomic factors outside of industry operators’ control that have a direct impact on their performance.

Each factor displayed in this section contains a chart followed by analysis of how this factor influences the industry.

For more in-depth data and analysis, click on the chart headings to jump to Business Environment Profile for each external driver.

This section details the industry’s regulatory environment. We outline what regulations affect the industry, whether compliance is different to comparable industries and how that affects performance. To determine the level and trend, an industry is compared to the total economy.

There are three types of regulation:

Deregulation, if applicable, may be mentioned, as it will have a considerable effect on nearly all aspects of operations.

The effects of regulation in upstream and downstream industries are also considered. For example, a new code of conduct for produce wholesalers would have implications for produce growers.

This section discusses what (if any) assistance an industry receives and why.

Assistance refers to government or other measures designed to improve the performance of an industry or areas of an industry, such as grants and subsidies. It also includes support from industry bodies, such as associations and lobby groups.

This section also covers protections, which refers to non-tariff forms of protection for the industry (e.g., regulations, tax concessions, quotas, quarantine restrictions, packaging, labeling and quality standards).

Natural protection refers to industries that do not face a high level of imports due to the nature of their products. Generally, these are industries that sell high-weight, low-value products that would not be cost effective to ship.

The types of assistance considered are:

The Financial Benchmarks chapter provides essential metrics to understand average costs for industry operators and offers key financial ratios and benchmarks, segmented by business size, for comparative analysis.

The Cost Structure Benchmarks chart in this section breaks down the average expenditure costs in an industry and its corresponding sector. All costs are represented as a percentage of total industry revenue.

Hover over the chart to see the percentage for each cost and click through the years at the bottom of the chart to compare the cost structure over the past four years.

The cost structure analysis below the chart explores relevant trends impacting industry costs so you can understand what’s driving this data.

The Financial Ratios section, available for the US, UK, Australia and Canada collections, includes comparative measures used to assess the financial health of the industry. We provide four years’ worth of ratios for Liquidity; Coverage; Leverage; Operating; Cash Flow and Debt Service; Assets and Liabilities.

You can filter these ratios by the following asset sizes:

More historical data for this section is available in the downloaded version. Read our article on Downloading Content for more information on downloading report sections.

This section covers the most important financial ratios for benchmarking a company against industry averages.

The Key Statistics chapter contains the raw industry data found throughout the report.

This section lists key historical, current and forecast data you can use in your own analyses. The data in this section is available as numerical values and annual growth rate percentages.

Chapter-specific Key Success Factors can be found throughout industry reports. The Key Success Factors page compiles all the Key Success Factors from the report in one place.

Key Success Factors highlight the critical elements that businesses within a specific industry must excel at to achieve competitive success and sustainability. These factors provide insights into what separates high-performing companies from their peers and help stakeholders understand the drivers of success in the industry.

The Call Preparation Questions help you get the most out of client calls by providing categorized questions and insights to guide conversations with clients and prospects.

These questions are updated every time the report is updated so they are always relevant to the current state of the industry.

The questions are broken down into Role Specific, External Impact and Internal Issues questions. These categories are further broken down into subcategories, allowing you to quickly find the questions you need to have successful client calls with any client in any industry.

Click on “Archived Reports” in the left-hand menu of an industry report to view past versions of the report, dating as far back as 2001. Learn more about accessing Archived Reports.

Found at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar of an industry report, this section shows other IBISWorld products for an industry.

Use this section to quickly jump to the products on your subscription or explore new products to add to your subscription.

If you have questions about what’s included in our Industry Reports, please contact your Client Relationship Manager (learn how). If you don’t have an IBISWorld account, contact us to learn more about our membership options.